Then, 2 years ago I created a new account that ONLY focused on a personal hobby of mine: retro-computing. I posted photos, links to cool articles, experiences from my workbench, etc. To my surprise, I began to get a lot of engagement. Like, 25-50X more than what I used to ever get on my professional persona's account.
I made a point to only follow back people who posted similarly to my own laser-beam focus. This takes a lot of time, but I have cultivated a stream of content I very much enjoy reading and scanning in my off-hours or lunch breaks. If you post about politics, or food, or cats, or simply whine or are acidic by nature, I don't follow those accounts back. I'm looking for good vibrations for a pastime hobby - that's it. And to my surprise (and those that know me personally and professionally that I've explained this to) it has worked beautifully for that. No one is a jerk and no one is trolling, none of that.
I've actually made several online friends around the country and the world as a result of the past 2+ years on Twitter.
Now, is my experience normal? No. If I were to guess it's probably in the top 2% in terms of the joy it brings me (vs. the rest of the user population who just hates to even look at Twitter anymore). And I totally get that.
I hope the service keeps going for my own greedy self-interests. But I also recognize that Mastadon may be the future, too. Or something else.
It's sort of how I changed my usage with Facebook. I deleted my personal account and created an anonymous account on FB that only is used for FB Groups (in, yes, the same hobby). These are closed groups that are moderated.
And holy smokes. It works.
Go figure.
Remove the YOU from social media, and use it to have fun about whatever it is you do to have fun, and it can actually be ... fun.
Most of my engagement consists of a private Slack groups with groups of friends who enjoy discussing various topics. (And within these groups I tend to subscribe to only the channels that I find more interesting.) Similarly, on Instagram I have one account where I follow a group of close friends I've mostly had since high school, and another where I mostly follow a bunch of car related channels I like. Having that separation and ability to go and seek out a specific kind of content is fantastic. (As opposed to just being subjected to a fire hose "feed" of whatever an algorithm thinks will be engaging.)
Actually, I resisted RSS in the past for much the same reason. Even though you curate the feed, I vastly preferred having a bookmarks folder of blogs and other sites I followed, which I could then pick and choose from to suit my mood, than to have it all served up in a reader.
It would be nice to see things move more in this direction. For example, the default Facebook view, rather than a general news feed, could be a set of groups you belong to, along with ad-hoc groups of interconnected contacts, encouraging you to pick what genre of updates or conversations suits your current mood. Even then I don't know if it would be siloed enough to capture the same benefits, but it would be a step in the right direction I think.
Discord today feels like how Facebook used to feel when it started: I'm actually friends with everyone on there, and we're having real conversations.
There's also 100% less politics, moral panic, virtue-signaling, outrage, ads, "fake news", Farmville invitations, and similar garbage.
It's nice.
Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations? Why not use a blog, personal site, or forum where instead of just posting a link you can also write your thoughts about it, etc.? I get not wanting to bother with running a personal site or maintain a blog, but there are tons of hobby forums.
Personally, I never got the appeal of Twitter, and while I did enjoy early Facebook, since it jumped the shark I use it primarily as a long-term contact list for people that I don't talk to very often so that we'll still have a way to connect if one of us changes email addresses/phone numbers before the next time we talk.
It has limitations, but it also has a lot of reach. A blog might not reach the people you are trying to share things with.
I actually do. I run a forum that I treat like a blog and link to my posts (and other members' posts) of interest.
Extrapolate that and compare it to these same kids going to apps like instagram or tiktok which are even more visually-heavy (and less text) with content that it's even simpler and more optimized for user reach than user participation.
Twitter is, like many things, what you make of it.
With a default mode of garbage.
I do have some family members on Facebook and in the past I would use Facebook to do things like share vacation photos, intended mainly for family members and close friends and the like. This now seems like an impossible task to do reliably -- there's no way I know that someone who hasn't seen my photos and want to will see it, from my perspective. So for me it's back to the ol' Smugmug and email. (I imagine there are other social networks that are able to work like I want, but most of my family isn't on it, and all of my family has email. This just works for me.)
Facebook does have "groups" which do work quite well as you mentioned, and Facebook works well from my perspective as an announcement / engagement platform for businesses and hobbies. Much of their core social network however seems broken to me personally.
(Regarding the parent linked article, I'm kind of curious where they are going to though and a better understanding of the reasons behind the shift. Most articles I've Googled don't seem to dive very deeply into these things beyond vague demographic musings like "Facebook isn't cool for teenagers" and mentioning Instagram and Snapchat as the replacement. The analysis level isn't even standard media depth to me, even more so than usual. If I look for articles on other things in relative decline where I do have a fair bit of insight -- like say NASCAR racing -- the general media articles actually seemed to (sometimes) make an effort to explain the often seem to make more efforts at explaining the declines, because the reasons are often multi-faceted. I have to believe that any Facebook decline is driven by a lot more details than "my parents are on Facebook".)
This doesn't change the fact that 99% of things people give credit for to social media can be easily done without mediation through a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Neither does it change the fact that Twitter and Facebook have a whole slew of horrible social effects. Centralization of the web, political polarization, emergent mobs trying to ruin people's lives, rise in depression and suicide rates, normalization of global surveillance, normalization of censorship, etc, etc.
Jaron Lanier has some interesting thoughts on the economy behind some of this:
Did you ever stop to think why? It's not like the barrier of entry was high. People simply did not find it worth their time. Chances are, big social media isn't worth their time either, but people are kept there by social pressure and purpose-built addiction mechanisms. And you're spinning it as if this is some kind of positive thing.
Connectivity is like food. The benefits to the person don's scale linearly. Forums and IM were already above the bare minimum. They were like a hearty meal. Social media today is like having a binge eating disorder.
I have a hard and fast rule of not friending anyone I see regularly or have a real private or personal relationship with (No family, no neighbors, no current coworkers). Avoids so much drama.
It's just finding those folks is hard.
I don't post personal stuff, I'm also not really intrested in that.
Although it pretends that replies are equivalent to top-level tweets, they're not really. It's just that there's a reply thread attach to everything.
Basically, CNN will tell you what your head of state did. Your regional media will tell you what your legislative representative did if it was newsworthy.
Twitter lets you keep tabs on your city councilman.
A sign of the times. A lot of people are just really pissed off right now. I also think a lot of people that used to ignore politics realized that it matters...
While political opinions are more numerous, they're divorced from evidence and calcified. As useful as no opinion, and possibly worse. (Then again, that's my opinion, right?)
The cost of communication, price and latency, has always defined the structure of our communities. Letters, cars, phones, internet, every invention expanded the reach of individual "community" while cost acted as friction to prevent bad ideas from gaining too much momentum - individuals still had to engage with their local community too.
Social media finally brought the cost to essentially zero. We can talk to anyone or about anything at any time. Great for early adopters and their critical/creative tendencies, but mass adoption by consumers has enabled mass tribalist tendencies to fully decouple from proximity constraints. This might be the "boiling point" for historical conflicts, but "supercritical" seems more appropriate here.
Media consolidation has been synonymous with consolidation of broadcasting viewer opinions and their political parties - many unhappy with both choices but faced with the false dichotomy of "their guy" and "the enemy". Meanwhile grass-roots are numerous but now diffuse and ineffective, cut off from broadcasting influence and digitally disconnected.
Hopefully society starts correcting back to offline engagement. Anecdotes suggest we are, but undoing the damage will still take a while.
>The cost of communication, price and latency, has always defined the structure of our communities. [..] Social media finally brought the cost to essentially zero.
Worse. It brought it in the negative, at least perceptually.
It is people trapped in their echo chambers. Some chambers are better than others (some, much better, but alas). I personally don't hold much hope for things to ever get de-calcified without some kind of large-scale real-world incident to force it. It is almost like two entirely different species of humans at this point who are almost incapable of empathising with each other.
(and note, in many cases, refusing to empathise.... I refuse to empathize with alt-right supporters for example.)
Democracies have never been about evidence, they are about making sure the "rulers" enjoy the support of the people and are strongly incentivised to listen to the concerns of said people. Democracies have a long and storied history of being arbitrary and unfair in defiance of evidence.
In light of that, I'd suggest interpreting political opinions as "I think this person understands what my problems are". When I mentally add that to the end of a political rant usually the rant moves from incomprehensible railing against reality to something rational, but disagreeable.
https://gist.github.com/potatoqualitee/d873c10d8cc578c11fc2e...
Other than that, and perhaps sharing more substantive articles/blog posts/etc to a wider audience, it's at best silly, and at worse, well...much worse.
Kinda sad.
You can also disable Twitter's annoying engagement-boosting features by muting special undocumented tokens like "suggest_recycled_tweet_inline" and "suggest_who_to_follow". https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/09/19/twitters-annoying-f...
So that’s all to say that there are less common uses of these platforms than you might know. Also, because of how I use it, Twitter doesn’t bother showing me any ads. I get about one ad a week. Go figure.
I think a huge feature for that is “mute”. Being publicly observed to follow a Twitter without actually seeing its content is, shamefully enough, important and useful a lot more than you’d think.
I will tell you what I use it for: follow interesting people, and pictures of cute animals. My goto rule of thumb for the first is, are they saying something where you go "hu?" in a positive way?
It's worse than facebook as far as the "get attention" vibe.
Granted all social media is about getting attention, and I don't think there is anything wrong with it necessarily. Attention is nice, there is good reason for it, but when the message is so tailored to just that and there isn't anything else, I don't know what the point is.
I recently switched careers from a long networking career to web development and thought I'd take another spin on Twitter, but rather I just get sites that paste a link to their website, and hordes of people posting programming truisms or career / resume / coding lifestyle fodder .... so little feels like that person wrote it, so much feels like what those people thing "a commercial about me" should be.
---
As for your other notes about the impact on people. It is horrifying. I see some relatives posting terrible things and I wish saying "but you've never met any of those people" had the impact that it should... but it doesn't.