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Twitter is Suffering
Twitter is suffering and Jaiku is showing off about how great that website is in comparison. They omit to mention two facts.
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It’s (giving the impression of being) proprietary, interesting mainly to Nokia users (at the moment)
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It’s better online (requires a browser to take full advantage)
Twitter is a mobile status tool of sorts
–edit note–
All text in italics is an edit following on from Petteri’s comment.
Pay-to-win Futility.
Several years ago a friend told me about Clash of Clans and I began to play the game. The game is an enjoyable distraction for when you have a minute or two three. You perform a few actions and then you get on with your other tasks. When you play for free patience is an asset. You have to wait to get enough gold, elixir or gems before you can complete certain actions. The game is designed in such a way that you can play for years and still progress.
I like to joke that the Pay  to Win model is both encouraging and training people to bribe their way through life. If you’re impatient you pay a little supplement and you complete the action. Instead of taking a week for an action to be completed it takes seconds. Supercell has made millions this way as individuals spend more than a thousand euros. Those who are willing to pay get to the top of the leaderboard.
Two factors that discourage Paying To Win.
The first reason is that I come from the early days of computer games when you paid for a game once and you could play for as long as you had free time. It was a time when Civilization 3, Gunship 2000, Doom and other games were around. With games like Clash of Clans, you spend more than you would spend on a good meal and you only progress a little.
The second is that accounts are or at least, were, platform specific. I started playing Clash of Clans when I had an iPhone. When I switched to Android I lost my progress and had to start again. It has taken more than a year to get back to the same level. If you pay on ios your progress is not reflected on Android and vice versa. It’s nice to have two level50+ games but imagine if I had paid to get the game on both platforms to be at the same level.
Clash Royale
Recently they came up with Clash Royale. This is another Pay to Win game and as you can see from the screengrab above it is currently the top grossing app on the play store, at least in Switzerland.
They released the game to a restricted number of countries at first. Some players were at an advantage. They could play and progress in the game. We were easier to beat as we arrived later.  Now we find it easier to beat the newcomers, as we have learned strategies to be victorious more often.
People who are less patient, less humble have obviously paid a lot of money to progress. I prefer to wait and progress for free.
There Are Two Parts To The World Wide Web
the future of the web
the search engine was the king, now it’s social networking.
People had their own home page, now it’s grown to their own website. The blog was grown and grown, replacing webrings
to be developed
For several years the search engine was king. This was the place where everyone went to find content because all the information was so disorganised. Recently though this has changed. The way people use the world wide web has evolved. Whereas people in the past would create just one webpage with a little content people are now creating entire websites.
These websites are not websites in the sense that they were back in the late nineties, rather they are profiles. It used to be that you’d create a static HTML page that would need to be updated manually through the hot metal code. With CGI-bin and later technologies, the nature of the homepage has changed.
Remember Geocities? It’s been replaced by myspace. Remember the discussion about web portals and yahoo and google were trying to corner the market to get the highest audience. That has changed. Look at Digg, Facebook, Bebo, twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. All of these websites are about one thing. Community. They are only interesting as long as your friends are members; no friends means no way of using it. I was a member of myspace for months before anyone I knew joined and by the time had joined I re-created a profile having forgotten the other profile.
It’s the same with Facebook. I joined it a few months before anyone from my environment started using it but recently everyone has started using Facebook to communicate. Not just this, they’re also uploading their lives to the web. So am I. There are two issues that are interesting to look at. For anyone wanting to do a dissertation why not look at the changing nature of privacy with the rise of the social networking website. When I was studying for my HND privacy was key and release forms were essential. Now it’s as though everyone is a publisher and the nature of privacy has changed. It goes along the lines of “Don’t upload anything too compromising or embarrassing”. Your network of friends can see everything. Friends from your high school days can see all your university friends and vice versa.
This promotes the expansion of social circles. Whereas in the past networks of friends were mutually exclusive due to location they are joined online. Take some videos of when you’re at a party in Switzerland and those in England can see it, and so can their friends if you so choose. It’s a shame you can’t select for only one network to see videos rather than others, for example, only London friends can see the London videos and Switzerland friends can see those. It would make uploading certain videos possible.
Anyway, the web has become personal. Within the last 6 months or so I’ve seen the web go from being about avatars and nicknames to being about real names and real networks. It’s about bringing the offline world online and vice versa. This is where I believe for there to have been a shift in perception of what the web is for. Almost everyone I know and see regularly is now on Facebook. It’s amusing to see how it’s become mainstream.
It’s as though Facebook has become a portal although not in the 1998 sense of the word. There is a new part of the internet. If you imagine the web to be like drupal then imagine that Yahoo and Geocities are the old gateways to the World Wide Web whilst various social networking websites are a new ad important portal with one major difference. These portals aggregate and distribute your content to your friends around the world. You’re no longer going online for research. You’re going online because you’re socialising. It’s replaced, at least partially, socialising in the real world whilst nonetheless providing a great way of sharing content. Both “user-generated” and “interactive” have become keywords in describing what the web is today.
In summary, whereas two or three years ago the Web was somewhere people came to find information for future use the web has evolved into an interactive user-generated medium. As a result of this, I think the world wide web has added another node to what purposes it serves.
Web 1.0: static and hard to interact anonymously vs web 2.0: highly interactive user-generated content where real names are now used, especially in places like Facebook.
Asking for Permission on Instagram
If you want to see how unhealthy social media is just look at this story about DMs on Instagram. Now if you want to DM someone that you don’t follow they can send just one text message.
Imagine, you’re a user of Instagram. You’re following friends, family and colleagues. Now consider that every fourth post is by someone you don’t know anything about. Now imagine that you see the influencers several times a day, every single time you refresh your feed.
Complete strangers are invading your timeline, polluting your streams, and in general reminding you of your social isolation, reminding you to feel Fear Of Missing out. You’re then told that the FOMO person can only be texted once. This is absurd, because Instagram isn’t a social media site now. It is an advertising platform with user generated content spread thinly.
Threads at a Fifth of It’s Peak
I read that Threads is now at one fifth of it’s 100 million user peak. It’s at around 20 million users. This makes sense. Why would people want a timeline filled with strangers, rather than friends? Why would people join a website/app that is part of Facebook. I know that it’s called Meta, to whitewash itself, but I call it Facebook, to show that the whitewashing effort failed.
Toxic Culture and the Need For Change
That Instagram feels the need to limit DMs tells us two things. The first is that they have made Instagram toxic. It’s because of this toxicity that everyone needs to protected from one eyed trouser snake pics and other forms of spam via DM. If Instagram was still a network of friends of friends, it would still be self-policing. It isn’t, so new rules need to be put in place.
The second thing it tells us is that rather than tweak the algorithm to make suggestions and conversations healthier, they are just adding barriers, rather than tackling the core issues.
Social Media and Iconoclasm
This morning before getting up I read about how some people rented a villa, and damaged a statue taking photos of themselves with it. It also mentioned at least three people adding graffiti to the Colosseum. The issue with social media is that instead of having the morality of healthy communities, it has the morality of advertisers and marketers. The result is the vandalism and iconoclasm that is becoming more and more common. social media algorithms amplify emotions, and emotions, especially on social media are toxic.
The Social Media Algorithm Distortion
Social Media Algorithms Distort Social Instincts and Fuel Misinformation
Key facts:
- Social media algorithms are designed to promote user engagement, thereby amplifying inherent human biases for learning from prestigious or in-group members.
- This amplification often promotes misinformation and polarization as it doesn’t discern the accuracy of the information.
- Researchers suggest that both users and tech companies need to take steps to mitigate these effects, including user education and algorithmic changes.
Social Media algorithms are toxic. Rather than tackle the cause of toxic behaviour companies like Facebook prefer to pretend that the problem is the user, rather than the algorithm that drives humans to behave in a toxic or trollish manner. Instead of encouraging humanism algorithms amplify emotion, because emotion encourages people to stick around.
In contrast, algorithms are usually selecting information that boosts user engagement in order to increase advertising revenue. This means algorithms amplify the very information humans are biased to learn from, and they can oversaturate social media feeds with what the researchers call Prestigious, Ingroup, Moral, and Emotional (PRIME) information, regardless of the content’s accuracy or representativeness of a group’s opinions.
“It’s not that the algorithm is designed to disrupt cooperation,” says Brady. “It’s just that its goals are different. And in practice, when you put those functions together, you end up with some of these potentially negative effects.”
In addition, the researchers propose that social media companies could take steps to change their algorithms, so they are more effective at fostering community. Instead of solely favoring PRIME information, algorithms could set a limit on how much PRIME information they amplify and prioritize presenting users with a diverse set of content.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Threads
All of these social media sights are driven by algorithms that amplify negative emotions, rather than foster community. That’s why I think hashtags are bad, and that twitter threads are bad. That’s why I think commenting, re-sharing and other forms of behaviour are better, especially in a chronological timeline, as we have with blogs and most of the fediverse. I won’t use pixelfed because it uses hashtags rather than categories or healthier community building tools.
We worry about AI but algorithms control more of what we see and feel, than AI.
And Finally
After decades of using Social Networks I have almost never felt the need to send DMs, especially to strangers. I usually use them sparingly, either to coordinate IRL meetings, or to share information that I do not want everyone to have access to. Instagram is restricting DMs not because they care about their users, but because they are deflecting from the problems posed by their algorithms that encourage polarisation, and trolling.
A nice streaming surprise
The month is almost over and I’ve got fourty megabytes of streaming left to play with so I’m going to take advantage of that with my mobile phone. Since cities around Switzerland are covered by 3g you may find that I’m using Qik, Bambuser and Flixwagon to stream what I’m doing.
Today I actually got Flixwagon to stream live over wifi which is better than i got yesterday and I found that streaming via qik works well on 3g.
In less than a hundred days you’ll have big crowds of people in the streets and that’s going to be for the European cup. If enough bars and squares have wifi then you could get the fans streaming their reactions live from the pub.
It’s the Vertovian vision, the All Seeing eye, and it’s a reality, no longer just a 1920’s eutopian vision.