social media

Substack makes the latest chapter of The Culling easy!

NOTE: This post is updated semi-regularly with any relevant news on the mentioned newsletters.

Substack has been in the tech/media news lately, for all the wrong reasons. Their position on moderation can be roughly summed up as:

  • Sex is bad
  • Incitement to violence is bad
  • Everything else, including actual Nazis, is OK!

After re-affirming that they would not actively moderate content on their platform, and only offering to remove a few newsletters specifically brought to their attention, a number of prominent newsletters opted to leave Substack, with most moving to Ghost, which, unlike Substack, is not a platform, just a company that provides a blog/platform service and that’s about it. Others went to Buttondown1My own piddly newsletter, recently renamed Doodlings and Noodlings, is debuting on Buttondown this very month, Beehiiv, other hosts or moved to self-hosting.

My stance on this situation is:

  • Substack is free to choose whom they host on their platform
  • I, likewise, can choose to not have any paid subscriptions on Substack, since my payments are helping to fund a lot of hate. See here for details: All the garbage I found on Substack in 1 hour
  • I also can choose to move my own newsletter elsewhere, which I have done

I’ve gone a step further now, by unsubscribing to all free Substack newsletters. In every case, I have written a polite message to the newsletter author letting them know why I have unsubbed. I’m hoping some of them will switch to other hosts, but at this point I think the ones who haven’t are probably leaning more toward not moving. And that’s their choice–as is mine to unsub!

I’ll update this post with any word back I may hear from these newsletters. The two I most recently unsubbed to are:

  • Austin Kleon (paid)
  • Experimental History (free)

UPDATE, January 29, 2024: Apparently I subscribed to a lot of Substack newsletters! 😛 Here’s more I’ve unsubscribed from:

  • Design Lobster (free–no pay option exists)
  • Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends (free–no pay option exists). UPDATE, January 29, 2024: The author wrote me back to say she has been in touch with Substack execs and is looking into moving to a different platform. Good to hear!
  • The Status Kuo (free, paid option exists)
  • GameDiscoverCo (free, paid option exists). I didn’t email to explain why I was unsubscribing, probably because I doubt they will move.
  • I’m Fine I’m Fine Just Understand (free, paid option exists). This one is weird, because it’s a comic about a person transitioning and Substack famously already had an exile a few years back for hosting openly transphobic writers. I also didn’t explain why I’m unsubscribing here.

I have perfected the non-post

This, of course, doesn’t look anything like me, and the hands are the usual nightmare stuff that screams “AI-generated”, but I still kind of like the composition.

These days I am restricting most of my social media stuff to Mastodon, and lately I’ve started doing non-posts. They go like this:

  1. See an interesting post from someone I follow, or someone whose post has been boosted by someone I follow.
  2. Start writing a reply to the post.
  3. Question whether the reply adds anything of value.
  4. Exit out of the reply, opting not to post it.
  5. Repeat Steps 1-4.

Why do I do this? I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’s related to this latent fear of saying the wrong thing, somehow, of offending or coming across as weird or odd. I am a fairly shy person in face-to-face interactions, and I think this might be the online equivalent to that. I just prefer to watch others talk. Or type, in this case.

Proving this, I was originally going to make this a post on Mastodon, then changed my mind and posted it here instead.

One last look at social media for 2023

Here’s my year-end summary of me and social media, by platform:

Mastodon: Pretty much the only one I use right now. I recently saw it described as the platform for nerds, and I think that’s accurate. After some initial interest when Twitter started falling apart under Musk, it seems to have peaked, but it’s still an important, useful and entertaining place. It takes more work and people don’t like that with their social media. I don’t mind, because:

  • No ads
  • No algorithm
  • A ton of third party clients for every platform, including alternate web clients. My current favourite is Phanpy, which is a terrible name, but a very handsome minimalist web client: Home / Phanpy

Facebook: Hot garbage. Also, cold garbage and medium-warm garbage. A hellscape of ads and “Suggested for you” with a few posts from people you’re following dotted in-between. I have no idea why anyone would use Facebook anymore, except for very specific purposes (you’re a member of a group, your family or friends refuse to move to something else because they are terrible people, etc.)

Instagram: The web version is still bare-bones and ugly. It will be this way for as long as it exists. It’s basically Facebook Lite at this point, but with more images and videos. Lots of videos. Do you like videos? Because it has videos. Also, plenty of ads. The ads are also videos. That said, it’s still noticeably better than Facebook, though I rarely visit these days.

Threads: It’s OK. For now, there are no ads, but that will change eventually, and it will join other Meta sites in being an ad-clogged hell. Very bare-bones and minimalist, but not the good kind of minimalist, just ugly and unappealing. If they follow through with federation, it may be possible to follow people and interact through one of the excellent Mastodon clients, so there is that. I check in every month or so, never post.

Bluesky: Their eventual business model (basically premium services over ads) is admirable in a way, but I am skeptical it can work. Also, the fact that it is still invite-only gives me pause. If they still can’t scale up now, after this long, when will they? It feels a bit like a doomed private club. The people there will have a grand time, until it abruptly shutters. I have an account, but have never posted. The web interface is also spartan and unattractive.

There are other social media platforms out there, but I either don’t have accounts or don’t use them in any meaningful way. And then there’s X (formerly Twitter) and all I will say about that is:

  • I deleted my account.
  • I give it a few more years of dumpster fire management before it finally shuts down.
  • I see a faint glimmer that the Twitter name could end up in the hands of someone who might do something good with it. But it is an extremely faint glimmer.

Overall, I get most of what I need from Mastodon, as it best fits what I want, which is not to have my posts showered with likes and adoration, because I seldom post and don’t care for or need the affirmation–while not denying likes and affirmation are still nice! I am interested in the trajectory of Threads as it relatives to the Fediverse. Everything else is pretty much meh to bleah.

We’ll see how things shake out in 2024, which will be all sorts of fun on social media with the U.S. presidential election at the end of the year.

My preferred Mastodon clients

Mastodon is currently the only social media I really read or post to currently, because I like its model:

  • I curate what I want to see–no algorithm!
  • It’s decentralized, so no one “owns” it and if your server goes to poop, you can move to another
  • No ads! I am fine with ads in some situations, but online ads are almost always awful, invasive, resource-hogging and can even contain malware as a bonus

Mastodon has a web client and an app for smartphones. Both are fine, but because there are no horrendous API fees or dictatorial owners crushing third party apps, you can enjoy one of many different apps. I use the following:

Mac: Mona. This is a one-time purchase (no subscription). It looks nice and runs well.

Windows: I use two web clients because all the Windows apps I’ve tried are ugly, bare-bones, or both. I have no idea why this is, but it is (IMO). For a more Twitter-like experience, there is Elk. And for a more minimalist experience, with cute animations and the like, there is Phanpy.

I checked out the Threads web app

Yes, I literally checked it out. And then I went on to other things. I could spend time “curating” a list of people/organizations to follow, as I did on Mastodon, but:

  • Am I really going to get something on Threads that I don’t get on Mastodon, other than whatever their algorithm serves me?
  • It’s busier, with more posts and more replies. My time is not infinite, do I really want more social media stuff to sift and sort through?

The thing is, I don’t have a need for Threads. I still check in on FB occasionally because it’s the “everyone is there” place, and IG sometimes, if I post photos. Mastodon is the only one I visit to actually check out stuff I might be interested in, to see new ideas or art or whatever. It’s not perfect, but I can overlook its flaws. It’s enough. I’d rather noodle around on this blog and be content with the handful of LLMs that check it out, really.

Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m not saying social media is bad/evil/wrong (though it probably needs a new name to describe what is has evolved into), I’m not calling for a return of the olden times when we all read newspapers that were 50 pages of dense print, and we called each other on rotary phones to talk about a TV show on one of the 13 available channels. I’m just saying, for me, a little social media goes a long way.

Bonus social media thoughts: A July 2023 update

I last wrote about social media stuff just a few months ago: Thinking about how I use social media: A sequel of sorts

At the time, I was checking the usual sites irregularly, as I’d switched to a bedtime routine of reading actual books. Since then, irregularly has become rarely. I just haven’t missed Instagram and Facebook, so this has been a kind of unintentional culling.

The reasons for why I haven’t missed them are summed up pretty much in the post linked above: Once I broke the routine of checking in every night, I found the content was just not interesting enough for me to tolerate the endless piles of “reels” and ads. Instead, I have been spending a bit more time on Mastodon, which has no ads (by design) and no algorithm (also by design). I only see what I want to see. I follow people, then unfollow if they don’t make my socks roll up and down. That is my bar now–you must magically animate my socks or off with you.

It’s worked out decently so far.

Part of me does kind of miss posting my photos regularly, but they were only seen by a handful of people anyway, and now I can focus on posting billions of photos to my blog instead! I think in some small way this may have slightly improved my mental health, too (not visiting FB and IG much, not the posting billions of photos to my blog part, though who can say for sure!)

And now kittens:

X-tremely dumb internet moves

I never used Twitter much and was kind of annoyed years ago when I had to use it for Nike tech support. For the most part, it was always just there, popular among journalists and some celebrities, and used as a quick ‘n easy way for people to make announcements, because on a microblog, you don’t have room for much else. People defeated this by posting tweets with images that would contain 2,000 words, but still, it stayed pretty much a place to link and post blurbs/memes.

In 2022 Elon “Galaxy Brain” Musk decided he wanted to be on Twitter’s board, then no, he wanted the whole thing! He waived due diligence, offered an outrageously good offer to buy the company ($$4 billion, vastly more than it was worth) and, following their fiduciary responsibility, the company’s executives presented it to the board, which promptly voted to accept and cash out.

Someone or something got through to Musk, and he realized he’d overpaid on a colossal scale, then tried to back out of the deal. Twitter sued and just before the case went to court–which Musk was all but guaranteed to lose–he agreed to have the deal go through and became owner/CEO of Twitter in October.

To say it has been all downhill since then is to insult hills that go down.

I’m not sure what exactly is going on in his mind, but whatever it is has seemingly steered him to make about the worst possible decision at every turn, chipping away at every positive aspect of Twitter. As a result, users are leaving, advertisers are fleeing, hate speech is on the rise, actual Nazis post their actual Nazi thoughts, the site is glitchy and breaks down occasionally, thanks in part to its gutted workforce unable to keep things running smoothly as most institutional knowledge has left (quit or been fired). Attempts to gain subscription revenue have generated peanuts. Basically, nothing has improved and a lot of things have gotten much worse.

The Twitter brand has been permanently tarnished in the eyes of many.

But wait! That brings us to the title of this post. A few days ago, Musk decided it was time to rebrand Twitter itself as X, his most favourite letter. Tweets would become X’s. And so on. To a 15-year-old boy this would be very cool, perhaps even rad, and since that’s where Musk’s apparent mental age seems to have stopped, it has come to pass.

There are too many articles, opinions and hot takes to link even a tiny percent of them here. Let me just say that I think it’s a dumb idea to spend $44 billion on a company whose value is in its user community and brand identity, then actively drive away the former and completely abandon the latter. It actually goes beyond dumb, but there is no word in English I can think of to adequately describe it.

However, changing Twitter to X frees Musk (at least in his own mind) from having the site/company “be” Twitter anymore. He can literally do whatever he wants with it–it’s X now!

This isn’t the first time a social media site has stumbled and (probably) died. Let’s not forget Friendster! But it is probably the biggest and, culturally, the most significant. This is all a good illustration of why allowing individuals to have access to absurd amounts of power and money is a bad thing. Musk is an idiot, and he has destroyed Twitter because our system gives him the power to do it.

(As a side note, the rebranding has been as chaotic, dumb and ill-planned as literally everything else Musk has done at Twitter.)

Here’s one link on the rebranding and the whole thing that I found worth reading, where author John Scalzi explains why he is (mostly) leaving Twitter after its turn to X: Preparing my X-it

My thoughts on threads

selective focus photography of assorted coloured thread spools
Hooray for threads. Photo by Wendy van Zyl on Pexels.com

Meta (née Facebook) launched its Instagram-adjacent Twitter-like social media platform Threads this week and at the moment it has proven very popular, picking up 70 million or so users in its first day. That’s nearly twice the population of Canada.

I don’t have any thoughts on it, actually. That makes the title of this post clickbait, probably. Sorry1OK, a thought: I logged in and spent a few moments getting a firehose of random stuff from random people. I failed to see the appeal and logged out. This is one of those “not for me” things. I’m good with that.!

Actual physical threads can be nice, though, if you’re talking about clothes or the string-like stuff clothes are often made from.

Here are more kittens.

A cogent reflection on social media and puzzles, not from me

In an Ars Technica story on Reddit iPhone app Apollo shutting down due to exorbitant new API pricing, a user opines thus:

I have quit Facebook and Twitter and now spend more time doing jigsaw puzzles and taking walks. My mental health improved drastically.

Ripaille

I just really love the idea of replacing Twitter (or any social media, but especially Twitter) with jigsaw puzzles.

Thinking about how I use social media: A sequel of sorts

close up photography of smartphone icons
Really, I just like the Google+ icon. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

As I do periodically, I had a thought. This one was about social media. There is a lot of analysis out there concerning social media. I’ve posted a bunch about it myself, including just last month. A recent U.S. surgeon general’s report on social media said it’s pretty much bad for kids, but with a few positives, which sounds like a precursor to government action of some sort. But maybe not.

Last year, I wrote about how I use social media. It hasn’t really changed in the past six months, though I do check in on Mastodon a bit more now, and check in on Instagram and Facebook less, especially since I no longer have a regular routine for doing so. I used to check them before bed on my iPad, but the blue light issue turned out to be a real thing, so I stopped with the late night internet socializing.

Now that the routine has been broken, it’s made me take another look at the two main sites I use to visit every day (if however briefly, much of the time) and think, “What am I really getting out of these?” Let’s have a look!

Instagram:

  • I get to see Nic’s birb photos, which are spiffy and nice. But although IG was created around posting photos, they actually look better on Facebook.
  • Tim posts sketches he’s started doing recently, including ones from a high school yearbook he found from 1960. These are great, and he only posts them on IG.
  • A gaming friend in Santa Cruz, Mike, posts occasionally, sometimes about surfing, sometimes local scenery (Santa Cruz is a pretty seaside town), and he has a dry sense of humour. He has his IG posts automagically repost to FB.
  • A metric ton of ads and reels, which I do not want to see. The reels (short videos) are especially obnoxious. I think I watched one about an airplane that was flying or doing some other airplane-like thing (keep in mind that on IG these videos autoplay as they scroll into view), and now IG is constantly shoving airplane videos into my face, no matter how many times I click on NEVER SHOW ME THIS AGAIN YOU GODLESS MONSTERS.

That’s pretty much it!

Facebook:

  • Mike’s posts on FB are the same as the ones on IG
  • Nic’s are also mostly reposts from IG, though he posts memes as well
  • Tim tends to post more personal stuff on FB, like photos of the family, but also memes and weird/kitschy stuff
  • A few other friends and relatives post nearly 100% memes or content they’ve seen elsewhere
  • FB also has reels, but they mercifully do not autoplay (yet). I keep hiding them, they keep showing up.
  • FB also has a metric ton of ads, and these do autoplay. I hate all of them.

To give you an idea of the ratio of ads to “content”:

On IG, it feels like about 50% ads, 30% content and 20% short videos (I’m not calling them “reels” anymore–take that, Zuckerberg!). It’s pretty awful. The one small mercy is the feed is actually in chronological order, and there’s a link to go to older posts if you missed something.

On FB, it’s about 45% ads, 45% “content” and 10% short videos or “People you may know” which also keeps popping up no matter how often I tell it to go away. Also, FB has this weird thing where it randomly starts shuffling stuff around. Old posts will suddenly come back, even though nothing has changed (no new comments/edits), while new stuff will get buried. I’ve sat back and watched the scroll bar in the browser jerk up and down for 10–15 seconds as it spazzes out. It’s both annoying and weird, but not the good kind of weird.

On balance, the only things I find especially worthwhile are:

  • Nic’s photos
  • Tim’s sketches
  • Mike’s photos

These three things form a tiny slice of what I actually see in the feeds, which are mostly ads and “hilarious” memes being reposted for the ten thousandth time (that day).

Can I go without these things I enjoy? Probably. Am I considering pulling the plug on the sites for a while as an experiment? Definitely.

I’ll probably decide in a few days whether to try it out. If I do, I’ll post my findings when the experiment ends.

Until then, NO I DO NOT WANT TO SEE MORE AIRPLANES THANK YOU.

How social media works

I saw this, appropriately, on Mastodon today, and it’s pretty much perfect.

I just want to add that quick-to-judge people have been around since forever, the internet (and social media) just grease the wheels for them, so to speak.

I looked at tumblr tonight

It’s kind of weird. Like, what if Facebook was nothing but posts from your eccentric friends you never hear much from any more, instead of your grandma?

But it’s still around, so they must be doing something right(ish).

Anyway, I’ll have more Social Media Thoughts™ soon.