social.noyu.me

Something Happened on twitter, and i entered the longest most productive and emotionally significant period of hyperfocus of my life, and channeled my anger and sadness into creative ends, and what came out was this blog post that's… very plausibly the longest thing i've ever written in one sitting, and somehow the most coherent and digestible. it's about what's happening to twitter. please read it. i poured my heart into it. https://hikari.noyu.me/blog/2024-10-02-the-algorithm-is-killing-twitter-and-its-driving-me-insane.html

@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.