social.noyu.me

for this reason i am going to almost entirely stop using twitter&co, effective immediately; if i look like i've seriously returned, yell at me; this is not an april fools' joke; if i do elaborate on this at all, it will be as a post on my blog, not as a tweet thread; cya

oh yeah: you can guess my discord username, you can find my blog on my website, and my email address is my website's domain name, but replace the first period with an at sign! there might be more ways to find me, i forget

i guess i should address what the “almost” in “almost entirely stop using twitter&co” means:

• it does mean, in general, not posting. you'd think that's a lesser evil, but no, i must kill the Tweet Voice
• i'll check notifications… once a day?
• i'll check profiles occasionally

@hikari can i like... send you projects and stuff time to time somewhere?

@rebane2001 i enjoy learning of projects! feel free to use any of the above-mentioned methods

@hikari oh i don't know how i missed that one, i saw the first two earlier but missed the third one somehow

@rebane2001 my server has very unreliable post delivery so it might be its fault

@hikari wait, does it mean tooter is a no-go too?

@nina_kali_nina same disease, same cure

@hikari this is not intrinsic to social media but a property of how you use and relate it; either a lack of skill or a lack of will to apply it

@whitequark @hikari while i don't necessarily disagree, i don't see why that *should* be the case

a bit like viewing "not being an anaerobic organism" as a skill issue when someone's cutting off your air supply

or saying the only reason we're against capitalism is because we're bad at marketing?

@whitequark @hikari

electronic reproduction of messages has always been a tool for asymetrically influencing people; and where there's asymmetry, there's agglomeration

the interactivity inherent to social media adds an ever-improving illusion of control to engage ppl further in what might add up to nothing more than their own oppression

@unspeaker @hikari i mostly want to talk to my friends and see what they're up to. i don't know where that adds up to oppression

@whitequark @hikari

it doesn't. many people are on social media for the reason you stated. this is useful to all involved - especially when other spaces are unavailable.

a second group is there to market to the first group. this is useful to the second group, often more than to the first group.

these two use cases provide a veneer of legitimacy to the whole endeavor, used by a third group of participants who surveil the first and second groups' activities, while themselves remaining unseen.

@whitequark @hikari @unspeaker because ultimately, all social media shows you the things it thinks you want to see

mastodon takes a naive approach to that, showing you mostly just the people you follow, plus trends curated by your admin and shoved away nearly out of view. youtube is the extreme approach, discarding who you follow and showing you only things based on what you actually watch. most other platforms fall somewhere in the middle

and what this means is that on any social media platform, there is a skill to curating your feed. you follow the people you want to see, engage with the posts you want to see, avoid engaging with the posts you don’t, unfollow (, mute, or disable boosts from) people who keep putting stuff you don’t want to see in your timeline, etc.

the algorithm exists to serve the platform, sure, but it also exists to serve you—it just doesn’t have great signals to know how to do that. there’s no good “show me more of this and less of that” buttons (and there can’t be!), you need to curate your experience yourself enough for the algorithm to take over

(that said, most platforms could stand to put in some work to make it less likely the algorithm will try to promote things you hate. unfortunately, that tends to reduce engagement, and they can’t have that )

@demize @whitequark @hikari

i realize i'm probably in the minority here, but i neither find it self-evident that those things which i *want* to see are the same as those things which i *need* to see; nor do i find it a good idea to remain uninformed about those things which i find disagreeable. it just feels too much like letting someone get the drop on me.

as long as there's a platform (i.e. an active intermediary), it will serve the interests of its users only as far as those serve its own.

@unspeaker @demize @hikari i trust myself to know what i need, yeah

@whitequark @demize @hikari

i'm glad you do. it's a good thing. but it's an assumption of the model - not a universal given. for example, are people who are vulnerable to manipulation somehow not real people, don't they exist on the same planet as you and i?

@unspeaker @demize @hikari "being resistant to manipulation" is a skill that i rather painfully had to learn; it would serve them to do so as well

had i had some sort of influence in design of social media systems, i would be thinking and talking about about it in other ways. but i don't, i design programming languages, and my concerns about social media begin and end at the individual

@whitequark @demize @hikari

i see your point. i feel much the same about resistance to manipulation.

i do fear that, at the extant levels of capital and power inequality, many people will simply have neither reason nor opportunity to learn it throughout their lives.

at the same time, their misguided actions continue to have bearing on the world in which we live, and create adversity for us. i see social media as a way to channel and coordinate that in novel and sometimes disturbing ways.

@whitequark @demize @hikari

besides, i'm generally skeptical about the concept of "individual": we experience ourselves as such - but the things that we're made out of, have nowhere to come from but from outside

a lot of who i am, i learned from internet; perhaps better parts of me than the ones shaped afk, but whether either kind serves me well deserves critical examination

i don't consider having influence to be a necessary condition for thinking about how one's surroundings are influenced

@unspeaker @demize @hikari an individual is simply an abstraction in the domain of application of power. it is not something inherent to our existence

@whitequark @demize @hikari

i 100% agree with that. thank you for formulating this so succinctly.

@whitequark this is certainly true, but for the time being, it is much easier for me to kick the habit entirely than to radically reshape it, for better or worse

@hikari fair!