By shutting Google plus in August 2019 Google have shut down one of my favourite social networks. From the start I have said that it reminded me of Jaiku, an excellent, european alternative to Jaiku that never reached critical mass and so was sold to Google, which then shut it down and eventually released Google+
Google+ is an excellent social network because it allows photographers and conversationalists to converse without the hype, without the cult of personality and without sensationalism. In other words it allows people to have conversations that increase their understanding and awareness of current affairs.
With the demise of Google+ we will lose this sea of tranquility and be reduced to go to miasmic networks such as Twitter and Facebook where the cult of personality, sensationalism and doctored newsfeeds prevent us from seeing what the people we want to keep in touch with are posting.
People argue that we could shift to Mewe, that we could shift to pluspora or other social networks but there are two issues. The first of these is that every jump from one platform to another takes weeks or months to feel familiar. The second issue is that when you’ve been jumping from web community to web community for decades like I have you get fatigued. I don’t want to spend weeks or months sorting through noise to get a crisp signal. I want to log in, skim for a few minutes, contribute, and then continue with my day. Joining a new social network would require a big investment of time and in three or four years that network may be sunset anyway.
That’s where WordPress comes in. WordPress is social media. People with a lot to say write blog posts that are hundreds of words long, with images, videos included, maps and sometimes graphs. Blogging is about connecting people confident with how they spend their time online.
Facebook and Twitter are social networks used by normal people who think they are wasting their time and lives by socialising in a virtual environment. Blogging communities are a place where people are committed to their desire to communicate in long form.
I am using the explore tab on WordPress’s app and commenting on posts. I am reverting to blogging. I like forcing myself to write long form posts, of developing my writing skills and my creative abilities.
Whilst everyone that was present at the Paris Seesmeetup has gone home to their day to day lives the images taken are still doing the rounds. I noticed that two of my images were included in Loic Le meur’s blog. Normally all the Francofous should be able to name every shown. Can you?
Because three or four, I’ve lost track of how many, live streaming applications for the phone aren’t enough i’ve started to play with flixwagon as well. So far it’s taking some getting used to but I hope that by tomorrow I’ll have learned more. It’s still an alpha and only works with select phones.
I could test it from here and now but it’s night time and there are more interesting places from which to play.
I have used Twitter almost every single day since I created my first account in 2006. During this time I have met a lot of people, gone to a lot of events, learned a lot and been part of communities. The decision to take a break is not an easy one to make, because it involves losing touch with a community. It involves leaving a social network at the moment when you’re following and conversing with more people.
I feel obligated to take a break for two main reasons. The first is that it makes rational sense to leave social networks when their ownership and morality swing to the Far Right. I don’t want to read news by Far Right newspapers, watch their news, listen to their shows, or be part of their social networks.
Theoretically I could simply shrink the number of people I follow and keep my tweets private, and I’d be happy with that. The real reason I want to take a twitter break is that I don’t want Musk to win. I don’t want him to be able to tweet “oh look, the servers are under pressure” and having leading poll questions that provide false justification for immoral points of view.
From a European perspective we cannot continue to use an app where disinformation is seen as free speech. We cannot be on a social network where the mainstream media, despite their Right Wing ownership in many cases, is denigrated and where he wants “citizen” journalism to thrive.
“So it’s perhaps no surprise that Musk, a billionaire businessman, went off on Apple this past week. He understands that the iPhone maker is an impediment to his financial goals.” source.
If I stop using Twitter, it is because those in charge at the moment go against sense of ethics and morality. I don’t want to be part of a network where people are brainwashed and misled. and where mob mentality is encouraged, rather than rational reason and thought.
Twitter should never have had an IPO. It should never have agreed to being sold, as it enriched greedy people, but with a cost to society at large. It should have become a non profit organisation, working as a medium by which for people to communicate with each other globally, where morality and ethics were prioritised, where rational, decent people made decisions.
We have Mastodon now, and with time Mastodon will be as vibrant as Twitter, but for now using Mastodon means being isolated from a community we enjoy, meeting in a place we no longer want to go to.
And finally, I don’t want Twitter to go away. I want user engagement to drop long enough for Musk to rethink his political lean long enough for twitter to become a place for good, once more.
Physical video gaming is coming of age thanks to the HTC Vive and related Games. Cosmic Trip is one of these games. You can use both controllers to prepare machines that will prepare robots for mining and defence. These two sets of robots are autonomous. The more resources you mine and the more robots you have. These robots are attacked on a regular basis so defence is important. The laser robots provide some assistance. You can attack the enemy bots by throwing disks at them as if you were throwing frisbees. Most people should find this instinctive.
In the last 17 hours more than half a million people watched the video on how to play this game. The game is still in development and building up hype for when it is released properly. The creator of the video above now has eleven million subscribers on youtube. When he produces a video eleven million people are notified that there is a new video to watch.
Out of those 11 million subscribers on youtube only 1.6 million follow on twitter and a quarter of a million on Facebook. Within the next year or two I would like to see social networks such as Youtube and others expand and become niche communities where people can find content of interest without using Facebook or Twitter. I found Jack Septiceye content when I was searching for VR demos. I use youtube rather than Twitter and Facebook because I don’t want content creators and sharers to tell me how to feel or why the content is of value. I want to make that decision for myself. Youtube and social networks that allow us to browse and discover content based on niche interests are going to become increasingly important.
The creators of the game have just two thousand eight hundred followers on Twitter and approaching one thousand on Facebook. When youtube personalities make videos about products they provide companies with a lot of extra visibility. You reach game players, people who want to see what new technology such as the HTC Vive can do and people who like to watch gameplay videos without necessarily being game players themselves.
Niche Audiences
Twitter and Facebook have focused on broadcasting rather than niche audiences. As a result of this strategy they have lost their stickiness. This leads to people spending less and less time on their social networks. This opens up opportunities for Youtube and other content aggregation sites. The more content you watch on Youtube the more recommendations you will get based on your taste. This cuts out the middle man, in this case Facebook and Twitter. We reduce the signal to noise ratio. We increase the user’s Return on Investment.
This morning I uninstalled Facebook and Twitter because most of the tweets I saw were people complaining about things or posts that would fit perfectly as blog posts on a website. We have moved towards the Social Media reflex, rather than towards an open sharing habit.
Before social media, we would have conversations on web forums and within comments on websites. As social media centralised all of those conversations so the engagement between people declined. With that decline of conversations so we shift towards two things. The first of these is complaining, rather than engaging. When you complain there is no expectation of a response so the personal investment is low. Add to this that algorithms are designed to promote posts that have a lot of engagement and you have a perfect storm of pessimism.
That pessimism has no positive outcome and it is for this reason that I removed the two apps from my phone. Twitter and Facebook will probably make their way back on to my phone within days or weeks but I’d like to resist and see what change occurs.
I have kept Instagram and Whatsapp. Both of these apps, although part of FB help us keep connected with people we still see in the physical world. I also love to walk around and take pictures to share to Instagram before reusing the same images for blog posts once I have time to write a proper blog post.
We need to take back the time we invested on Social media, and reuse it for productive pursuits as we did before Twitter and Facebook post-2007. Twitter and Facebook were productive when they were just websites, rather than profitable.
Blogging, as a challenge
I like to see blogging as a daily challenge. The challenge is to find inspiration to write at least three hundred words on a topic every day when possible, and after every adventure when not possible. We improve our writing and creative skills. We go from a blank page to remembering what we did, as well as developing our ideas from 140 characters to three hundred or more words. The result is something that others can read. When it’s about hiking, Via Ferrata, climbing, travel or other topics it may even inspire them to follow and try the same thing.
Another part of this challenge is to write half a paragraph or two and run out of inspiration, think for a few minutes, walk around, put some batteries to charge and then coming back with more. Whereas a tweet or facebook post is a single thought shared within seconds a blog post is a cohesive collection of thoughts that join together to form a blog post. Every blog post is an intellectual journey.
Sustained positivity
Aside from finding inspiration for blog posts another challenge is to try to keep them either positive or neutral. If you write a negative blog post you are not anonymous and it is sustained for a few paragraphs. If you write a positive blog post and sustain that for a few paragraphs. The reader and the writer have gained something.
Something Worth sharing
Blogging is about creating something that is worth sharing. It isn’t about filling time like Facebook or Twitter. It is about thought, inspiration and experiences. It’s about having something positive to share. Whereas some people want to write a thread I do more than that. I leave the stream of constant interruptions and I focus on just one thing, until it’s done, or I run out of inspiration. I wish that the same people who write twitter threads would write blog posts instead.
To write a blog post is to invest your time in an activity that may get no response, or if it does get a response it maybe years later. This doesn’t matter. We read entire books without leaving a response for the writer, except the money we spent to buy the book. Social media has tricked people into believing that without a response, whether a like, a favourite, a comment, or a share they are being ignored. “I’m not writing a blog post because no one will read it, that’s why I write a thread of tweets”.
The time that you spend writing a blog post is the time that you have invested in a finished product. There has been less “mindless scrolling”, fewer interruptions and best of all you have something tangible to show. “Yes, I did spend an hour writing this blog post, but I did something productive with my time”.
Compare that to this article in the Guardian. ;-). I haven’t uninstalled the apps because I’m worried about the time I spend on social media. I uninstalled the apps because the Return on Investment (ROI), as a user, is almost zero.
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