social.noyu.me

jesus if the responses i'm getting to this from just one friend are any indication, i may end up having to make another post composed entirely of discord screenshots that's just, god-knows-how-many other ways this situation sucks and relevant anecdotes. tip of the iceberg

something v funny is that, because the algorithm hates external links that might draw you out of the orbit of the Engagement Funnel, this post is actually blowing up far better w/ twitter refugees on fedi, rather than on twitter; it's safe from the algo!

(like, my twitter friends that have read it seem to find it resonates deeply with them, but the algorithm is refusing to recommend it, so it's spreading only in the traditional ways. very fitting.)

@hikari for some reason this reminds me of the period when twitter had just started allowing images on posts. For a while people would just add images when they had an image to share, but after a while Brands started adding images to every tweet, even if just clip art, because it attracts more eyeballs and take up more timeline space. I was so incensed by this abuse of the new functionality that I reported some tweets that were engaging it. Unsurprisingly it didn’t go very far.

@hikari 💭 ( putting links in tweets purely as a protective talisman )

@hikari yes, and you can actually follow the progression of your post through fedi by watching your notifications, and how people discover you is entirely organic, from what approximates to word of mouth, but for the internet, which is indeed a breth of fresh air because it allows us to realise that social media can exist without optimising for maximum engagement, maximum anything really. After all, you aren't like on tictock, turned on heat or however they call it, so you have the possibility to be who you want to be, even in a public space, and screw those who don't like it, you can just block or mute them and be about your day, without a random black box algorythm deciding that all the energy you just pored into a post is suddanly worth nothing anymore, and that no one, not even those who follow you, get to see it, not even if they search for it explicitly.

@hikari i think one thing that caused or at least accelerated this shift isn’t just a change in what the algorithm does but also them making the purely algo „for you“ timeline the default. A lot of people do not change the default. I was talking to someone recently who *did not even realize that you can switch to „following“* on twitter.

@halcy yeah, and it's not just the default being pushed so hard, it's also that it is a “timeline” to begin with. there was a time when the algo recs were just sprinkled in alongside normal following stuff, not their own thing. and as much as it annoyed me and everyone else at the time, that was much closer to a good model, imo

@halcy@icosahedron.website @hikari@social.noyu.me, do you really think it was better when getting access to a proper feed was locked behind an arbitrary sparkles / clock button that randomly overwrote itself and that you had to know in order to know?
The change to make the follow feed a separate header from the random shit feed was like the one good thing the Elon era did.

@aliceif I do think that the sheer pushiness has increased (though they toned it down after) with the change that made it switch to For You every single time you opened the app plus sometimes randomly anyways and with third party clients being gone, but who knows. I have not been an active twitter user for a while, so I get this as mostly second hand information and/or noticing that my feed is dogshit once again whenever I do open it maybe once or twice a month

@aliceif @halcy oh i agree that being able to just swipe between them is great, but that's not really the problem

@hikari "eye of clownron" amazing (still reading, do not know what the incident was)

@ryanc feels like i temporarily unlocked the ability to have a way with words when writing this. glad you're enjoying it

@ryanc @hikari “eye of clownron” == reply”guys*”? seen them many times whenever something is spreading outside of audience and the context is missing, I dunno if they think they are trying to help or what, but it’s usually borderline “man*”splaining

* need gender-neutral terms here

@yottatsa @ryanc yeah something like this

@hikari excellent, excellent piece. we have no idea what the inciting incident was and we think that's all to the good. some very solid new insights in here, and some great examples and framing of all of it.

@ireneista thank you!!!!

@hikari this is painfully relatable, especially the second half — I was hopelessly attached to Twitter, with a big part of that being the friends and connections I made there!

what made me leave, despite this, was the fact that the platform was actively destroying the way I used it. the last straw for me was the day they limited how many tweets you could see

and i still miss the people that haven’t moved elsewhere

@Ninji 💙

yeah i. i don't know how to process it. it wasn't, isn't, just a website for me

@arianvp tragic, very sorry to hear that

@hikari this reminds me of a thread from the other week https://aus.social/@kate/113177379442388330

@hikari thank you so much for writing this and putting all of this into words

@r <3!!!!

@hikari thank you this was interesting. I'm particularly in agreement with the part about the "socialness" going away, and I think it applies to all commercial social media. Commercial social media is turning into traditional TV: a one-way avenue to show ads to users. The content doesn't matter as long as it keeps you engaged, so from their perspective there's no point in letting you form social bonds anymore.

@gabrielesvelto yeah. i think the decay is so upsetting on twitter because it used to be different; there's other sites that were basically always like this and therefore didn't experience this kind of loss.

@hikari I was never that online on twitter . your writing gave me new inside on what people are losing.

I only know similar from university, like having a friend group, being able to talk about interests, having music and arts

Then everyone has jobs, moves different places, and so on
And you can never get that same energy.

It is so much that needs to be grieved. And I don't know how to do that well.
I don't think many people learned that.

@hikari You don't have a public e-mail address to receive fan mail from, do you?
I really liked that post and I feel like I have a lot to share as someone who grew up on twitter as well but then already proceeded to delete her account with the death of tweetdeck in 2023.
...only if you're interested in my rambling of course, since I'm also just another person on the internet, it's super fine if you aren't interested.
I'd share more here but my instance also limits me to 500 characters

@KurisuVanEdge thank you!

if you replace the first period in my website domain name with an @ sign, you get my email address

@hikari thank you for writing this
Especially the emotional stuff. I'm grieving the community/ies I had and the ease of access to people from all over the world. I was on twitter for 13 years, often multiple times a day.

I have also seen people in care about lose themselves in the rage/cringe spiral to the point of treating IRL discussions like twitter dunkfests, goading friends and family like they can "win" by getting them to nope out of the discussion.

@hikari I'm still struggling to find myalgic new space for microblogging (it is really the most accessible mode of online expression for me) and I find Bluesky to be very prone to the same ganging up on "main characters", Dunkirk on people until they block you first era of twitter culture and I don't think I want that.

@hikari I did not notice how much autocorrect messed this up. It does regularly replace "my" with "myalgic" because apparently I type out my diagnoses list just that often

@hikari I read this on my lunch break and to echo others, yeah, this resonates

I don't know the specific incident off the top of my head, but I've observed much the same as you with the decline of Twitter and wholeheartedly agree on what made it special in the first place, the community connections, of seeing the stuff the people you care about (friends, respected experts, cool strangers, etc) wanted to post about

Actually, you managed to get a few steps further ahead on the thought process than I'd gotten, connected a few more dots on the self-perpetuating death cycle and articulated it very well

I've been on Twitter 14 years, I transitioned (into an adult and of the genders, and many other changes) during that span and while I can't claim all or even most of my friends were made there, a fairly significant chunk were met there - and there still remains a handful that have yet to migrate anywhere else that remain the main reason I check Twitter (down to a few times a week, rather than many times a day)

The clash between those there for Content, those there for specific audiences (Mutuals or otherwise), the need to recognise that the hellsite is exploiting those cringe/outrage reflexes...I think it's far too late, even if many of us gain Awareness of the problem, it's too little, too late, especially when Twitter itself is self-sabotaging

And that sucks. The replacements, for all the effort and ideals, and in many cases better (albeit not perfect) design, cannot capture that same spark, and now many of us are scattered and either maintaining a half dozen social media presences more than before, or have to accept a certain degree of loss if unwilling to say, engage with Bluesky, or just lacking the energy to properly crosspost and cross-read everywhere

Thanks for writing this

(and I guess you're right, I should have some water...oh and actually remember to eat, as I checked social media and read this instead of eating on lunch break, oops)

@hokaze ❤️

@hikari Thank you for writing it, this is an excellent piece. Very clear description of the issues, some great turns of phrase in there too. I love "scorched-earch engagement."

At this point I just don't think there's anything to be gained by engaging with 2024 Xitter. It has all of the bad parts of 201X Twitter (the Anger Machine, context collapse, the Eye of Sauron, etc.) but cranked up to 11, and none of its virtues (interesting people from cool subcultures). It used to be hugely meaningful to me as well but I finally decided to break off earlier this year and i haven't looked back.

@kaye thank you! i… can't really disagree. i keep coming back to twitter because the dying embers of cool subcultures there (that i haven't found elsewhere) still bring me joy, but it will not be long before they're completely dead :(

@hikari I think, THIS particular Problem started even before the Takeover of Musk and before the algorithmic push for "engagement", and was a large contributor to why Twitter started to become less fun for me. As some weirdo who likes to be right about things, this was basically turning me into venom (like the character in the Marvel Comics). Supercharging me and my righteousness, but also slowly turning me into an reactionary, and it was no fun, but I couldn't help it.

@hikari Seeing though these changes was a hurtful and frustrating process. And it still takes some practice to not repeat these mistakes here in the fediverse.

Knowing, that the Twitter Board (thx Elon) decided to built on humanities worst tendencies just makes my skin crawl. I'm glad, I left that space and feel a mix of frustration, pity and rage about all the people who still decide to go along with it.

@hikari Funnily enough, I think, it also exemplifies the core problem about the belief, that the Fediverse *must* grow in size and in interconnectivity (via federation).
I don't want to know, how many otherwise fine instances happen to get on blocklists, just because of some "engagement" between admins.
I remember mstdn.social blocking mastodon.art (or was it the other way around?) just because of spiritual differences on moderation policy. (a very airtight vs. a bit more loose approach).

@hikari this is a good post

@mcc thank you very much

@hikari that third-last section "part number the somethingth" rings so true and relatable, just the same for me. *sends hugs and cats, if welcome*

@diebarschlampe <3

suddenly wishing i had the old android blobcat emoji on my instance, it'd be so nice here

@hikari here, enjoy smol blobcat and chonk blobcat

@hikari I'm perma-locked on twitter so I went on here so I could say, thank you for writing this. I found myself less drawn to the assessment of what that place's become, something I could just find myself quietly nodding along, already having made arrived at several of those conclusions myself...

but I resonated, a lot, with how you describe what that place's meant to you, what you used it for. kept saying "yes! yes!" at the list in "twitter is not just for Tweets About [Thing]...". I can only mourn it, as you're right, you can never rekindle magic, you can only create something similar. the people whose thoughts I cared to hear, they all went elsewhere (mastodon, bsky, cohost (rip)) or nowhere ("you can always hit me up on discord") and there's just less and less of them as all the problems you described continue to hollow out the few positive aspects left of it. I couldn't really find the words to make the close people in my life understand these feelings, but maybe if I show them your blog post I could. thank you. I've followed you for a while, very vaguely adjacent to those pico-communities you mentioned, and I hope i can continue to follow you and hear more of what you have to say

@fishtrauma i'm glad it resonanted strongly! honestly i think i only fully realised for myself what twitter was to me and what twitter was for in the process of writing that post. i had a vague idea of the decay but it was only at something like half-way through writing this that it clicked

@hikari This was a great post. A lot of what you said here reminded me of this paper: https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/23/3/163/4962541

@hikari I don't know if this is anything, but it just occurred to me that there is a kind of Theatre in the Round quality to social identity performance, where our audience is also our fellow performers. And I think the Algorithm isn't built for that kind of dynamic: it privileges a more traditional idea of performance with a passive audience (which is what happens when you think of performance as 'content'), while at the same time the structure of the platform empowers the audience to become, essentially, hecklers.

And perhaps it's that contradiction that leads to the toxicity, I dunno.

@Catriona ooh, very good observation, thank you!

@hikari I think it's also worth noting that Twitter and Twitter-likes are a very different *kind* of communication than can really occur anywhere else. I could text a friend, but that's talking directly to them, they'll feel an obligation to respond, and it's probably not the place to dump random thoughts. Whereas Twitter is like, I keep thinking the term "parallel play"? We're doing our own things, but can see each other and respond if it feels right? Posts aren't directed at anyone specific.

@hikari The closest I've found is maybe group chats, but that loses the asynchronous aspect nearly entirely, unless it's a very small group. No one is going to scroll six hours back in an active group chat, but someone might see a tweet of mine from six hours ago. And with the enshittification of everything, feels like even the chat apps are ticking time bombs

@yirggzmb yup :(

@hikari @nina_kali_nina

> but you gotta understand. i've been on it my entire adult life, more than a decade. it is responsible for seemingly everything good about my life, it's brought me almost all my friends, it's immensely enriched me in so many ways, it took me from a reclusive and boring and socially-unaware person to someone with dreams and friends and a vision and a life which is

this is the exact kind of grief i went thru whenever that dipshit took over. time to cry & move on ❤️‍🩹

@hikari thank you for writing that and I’m sorry you have been through that emotional journey. I had a similar but different one (see https://buttondown.com/andypiper/archive/andys-discoveries-and-musings-issue-8-advocate/ and https://buttondown.com/andypiper/archive/andys-discoveries-and-musings-issue-9-from-there/ and https://andypiper.co.uk/2023/07/31/goodbye-to-my-life-on-twitter-2007-2023/)

I completely agree with your conclusions; but, it is and was Musk and everything he brought about, that killed Twitter.

@hikari all I have to say is “💜”

@demize 💜!! thank you

@hikari thank you for writing this ❤️

@0x2ba22e11 you are very welcome

@hikari this is good write-up, thanks for pin-pointing the mechanics of twitter as a medium!

i think that people who

1) were praising G+ circles, or
2) feeling better in chat mediums

choosing a place for subculture that less affected by lossy context and audience escape [in comparison to the social networks] in exchange for less reach.

imho [speculating] engagement/reach mining was tell-tale sign [for Facebook employees] showing that company in need of ads and investors money.

@hikari This is a total aside, but re your comment about threading possibly being an accident... I'm pretty sure it was intentional because it used to be that replying to your own tweet didn't make it a reply, but posted it as a disconnected tweet. They modified it to make them thread in something like 2012. Don't know there was ever any public announcement about rationale though.