I’d like to discuss Mastodon, Social Media and addiction. Specifically I would like to discuss how I do not want to invest my time in a social network where people are already discussing social media s if it is an addiction. We have seen that this has a negative impact on social networks. Look at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others for illustrations of this.
I do not want to be part of social networks and social media that are viewed as addictive, because it sends the wrong message to users, and potential users. It sends the message that rather than investing time in meeting new people and making new connections, you are giving in to a craving for an addiction. Back in the day I remember when I disliked likes, favourites and thumbs up for a simple reason. It replaced conversation with statistics. “Three people favourited this, five people starred that and 23 people gave this a thumbs up.” Instead of having an exchange of a few sentences we are interacting by likes, stars or thumbs up. This isn’t socialising.
Social networks, and by association social media should about following and joining converssations, about connecting with people, without the spectre of “addiction” floating over us.
By saying that social media is addictive it gives marketers the green light to abuse decency, to get engagement. It allows those who own or control social networks to decide how people interact. Finally it’s a value judgement that biases people against investing their time and emotional self on social networks because they do not want to be labelled as addicts.
If people on Mastodon have all the bad habits that discourage me from using Twitter then aside from leaving because of the leadership issue, what reason do I have to continue using social media? At the end of the day if I invest an hour a day writing blog posts then I might gain more.
The latest version of Seesmic was rolled out this evening during the Demo Presentation by Loic Lemeur and amongst it’s newest features are replies counters so that you can see how many people reacted, a latest tweet display and faster loading times for the pages. There is an active conversations tab in the lower right corner and the shows tab has been replaced by a replies tab.
The site is far slicker and easier to use. Great changes.
Loudmouthman, amongst others was expressing his desire for a means by which to aggregate all our online data through one central account. I though of Freebase and Openid and how they could work. Google though had other thoughts. Whilst Facebook behaves like a portal opensocial helps agggregate content. Facebook assumes thatyou come to their website, spen an hour there and then disconnect. Opensocial assumes that you are an active participant of the new socialmedia landscape on several websites at a time.
We currently have a growing number of people that spend more and more time using new technologies to communicate with others. Most of us have flickr accounts, joost accounts youtube and more but for our friends to keep up is a challenge. Getting them to sign on to any social network is particularly hard. Myspace was the key website for a while before facebook overtook.
In the past two days I’ve joined Lijit and Open Social. Both work the same way. They take your user id. in my case warzabidul and you tell them which networks you’re part of. The content is then aggregated to a central pag. As more and more friends join open social and lijit so you should get a greater sense of what they are up to. It’s a convenient way to keep up to date with what friends around the world are doing.
Look at the sidebar to get an idea of how Plaxo Pulse is using the opensocial idea. Florian Seroussi also pointed me to this article that should help you understand what it’s about.
I’m looking forward to more people using it and I love the great flexibility that it will give it’s users. If you’re using it them write a comment and I’ll visit your site to see your social media presence.
Venture capitalists love to invest in something that works, something that’s concrete. If it’s got a 900% user growth rate overall and tripled in size in the UK alone then this is excellent. That’s the perfect website to invest in. Of course I’m speaking here of twitter. The 140 character twitter website that no one has time to use yet everyone flocks to. With the recent twestival you see that it’s gone local, and that can only mean one thing, that it’s gone mainstream. Perfect, now the web celebs can come in without looking too geeky. Cue Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry to name just two individuals.
It’s passed though. The golden age of twitter is behind us. 140 characters and social presence have moved on from there and I think the companies we should be focusing next are feedly. friendfeed and google reader. The reason for this is simple. We all love to create content and we all love to talk about it. We all love to show others that we’ve found something but the drawback is that we create a lot of duplicates. These duplicates aren’t bad if you’re only following five or six friends. When you follow twenty eight thousand though it does start to get tedious however.
That’s where I feel real enthusiasm for feedly. As you go from blog to blog you find a lot of content that’s interesting but aside from what’s written in the comments for each post you have no idea of what others have thought or said about this. Feedly gives you a small box at the bottom right corner that tells you the number of conversations that have taken place and a quick method by which to see which are the most active references to this post. As a result you don’t need to wait for the kettle to boil to start a conversation. It’s already there.
That boiled kettle of course is Friendfeed. That’s where people will be moving next. That’s where we will find the conversation moving next. Watch the realtime thread and you can see who liked the post, who was vocal about it and when the most recent comment comes in. What this implies is that the limitations felt by twitter will become a thing of the past. We’ve got a high end solution for our content needs.
Of course we’re individuals. We all like to have our own rss feeds and personal content and that’s where google reader integration comes in. At the start and end of the day, when all those we are following are taking care of their children or walking their dogs we can go hunting for original content. We share that content and once people wake up they can comment and so the cycle continues.
Other websites are now providing more interesting options and deserve at least part of that pie.
The social media living room is great because it’s really any device that you can connect to the web with, whether a simple mobile phone or a full spec desktop computer.
Some of us look at the computer first thing in the morning and last thing at a night. This is as much as part of a technological expansion in the form of broadband.
Just today an article by the BBC described how people are more and more wired with 90% using broadband, or some similar number. What this means is simple
More hours spent therefore more conversation. With twitter it’s more overheard conversations. That’s not where it stops.
Twitter, seesmic and similar websites turn a private discussion into a public one where the “overheard conversation” is a key point. It’s an evolution back to the route of internet chat. 10 years ago I spent 13hrs in a row online and I saw the shift from Australia to Japan, India, South Africa, Eastern Europe, Europe, NEw York and more.
The difference is that at that time there was no meta data and the initiator to conversations was ASL. Now it’s reached maturity for those of us early adopters. Many of our friends are middle adopters and when they start using it they will not take full advantage.
Look at how people use facebook. When asked by @leisa on twitter during a meeting in real life how often I checked facebook I answered as much as my e-mail. A lot of people do.
What is not talked about is how middle adopters use it. They are far more limited. They don’t add rss feeds because they have no blog, few pictures if any on flickr and in general do not create content. They’re lurkers. Almost all of my friends are facebook I’ve been to parties with, studied or a combination of more. As a result it’s a personal network of IRL friends who have links to each other as well as through me.
These people don’t use twitter, jaiku, tumblr, Pulse plaxo or more. I surprised a conversation on facebook where after seeing someone comment on their post one facebook user asked the other how dare they comment. They didn’t understand the principle of the forum. That’s something all of us are familiar with as early adopters. We are not technological determinists. We believe in the need for something and create a technology to cope.
Look at Seesmic. It’s video. It’s twitter with video. One person commented on how it was based on time consumption. He said that although he would love to see everyone’s video and listen to what they have to say that because it’s time based it would take too long. As a result he’d follow just the friend’s timeline.
This brings me back to twitter. How many friends do you have. Do you still use the public timeline or is your friend’s timeline filled with more than enough conversations not to need this?
I think it’s a really interesting conversation. How does the social media living room integrate into your daily activities.
Networking around Pokemon Go is less interesting now that everyone plays the game. I have heard non geeks talk about Pokemon Go. They spoke about the large crowds that are staring at their phones in places like Ouchy. The value of social movements is to be part of a small, passionate group of players where the community is large enough to be fun but not so large as to become mundane.
With a game like Ingress players were more sparsely distributed. When we met other players there was an immediate connection because we were few and far between. You would walk around certain cities and villages and you would not spot other players for hours of game play. When you met another player you wanted to meet, you wanted to interact.
Communities are fun when they are small. Pokemon Go has risen in popularity at such a rate that old social networks may be privilieged over new ones.
I was at the Chateau de Prangins a few days ago playing ingress for a short period of time raising the level of Ingress portals. During this time I saw at least 5-10 adolescent boys playing Pokemon Go, walking and running around the park.
Pokemon Go is like alcohol or snowboarding. As everyone plays the game the opportunity to create new social groups is reduced. Why mix with new people when your core group of friends is already playing?
The Facebook, telegram, slack and Google Hangout groups are alive and well this summer so people are connecting with new people. Although a new network of people is forming around this game I feel that it is hindered by the popularity of the game. Introverts can connect online via these groups, Meeting new people face to face may not be as comfortable due to the large crowds.
It’s great that a location based game is encouraging people to run around while staring at their phones. Phone screen replacement companies are very happy with the increase in demand for their skills and external battery sales are going up. Prices are going to go down and innovation is going to go up. If you’re an introvert, bad at small talk, then Pokemon Go has reached its peak usefulness and you can revert to other less popular activities. You can skip the craze.
Twitter is alive and healthy, with vibrant communities and an opportunity to converse with people and find information that mainstream media are sometimes slow to report on. Over the last week that balance is swinging towards less positive times.
In Europe, freedom of speech, and freedom of expression require people to say things that they can back up with evidence and facts. If you say something that is demonstrably false, or demonstrably misleading then you are held to account for this.
In the US they believe that freedom of expression includes the freedom to lie with impunity, to spread disinformation and to mislead people, without consequences. By doing this society is vulnerable to tyranny and fascism. If we are told a lie that we want to believe then we are less likely to quibble its veracity. We will repeat the lie, and if we see people who enjoy the same lie, then we will repeat that they have told the same lie. Disinformation is a positive feedback loop of false information being spread as real information, once it gains enough traction.
By buying Twitter, and by saying that Twitter wants to bring freedom of speech, and freedom of expression Musk is saying something that we all value and think is important. The problem though, as I have mentioned above, is that the freedom of expression that Musk is talking about, is not a European freedom, but an American one. It is suspected that he would bring back people like Trump, and that he would make twitter a welcoming place for people to spread lies and disinformation, in impunity.
There is another larger scope to this conversation and that scope is that Twitter is a global social network used by over a billion people a day. During this pandemic it has allowed people who want to find information about the risks presented by Covid-19 to follow experts in their fields, to hear accounts from sufferers of Long Covid, and to get a global appreciation of the risks of the disease. When the WHO backs up what the experts have shared on twitter, and vice versa, when the information makes sense to our moral compass, then Twitter is a great resource for information. It should be protected. It should not be possible for one individual to buy a network with over a billion users.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,”
There are plenty of ways in which people can be proponents of free speech. They can invest in education, they can invest in newspapers, they can invest in library projects and more. They can invest in making sure that people are granted free and equal access to information. You don’t need to buy a social network to promote free speech. Remember that freedom of expression comes with the obligation to be well-informed, and knowledgeable. His “freedom” is to spread rumours and opinions. These undermine, rather than help democracy. I believe that he wants dismantle the gatekeepers, so that it is even more challenging for people to have access to trustworthy information.
On Monday, he tweeted that he hoped his worst critics would remain on Twitter, because “that is what free speech means.” He added in his statement that he hoped to increase trust by making Twitter’s technology more transparent, defeating the bots that spam people on the platform and “authenticating all humans.”
When Google bought Jaiku, and when Facebook bought Instagram we stayed on the networks. Jaiku eventually became Google+ but Google+ was then dumped. Instagram, after being bought by Facebook lost its soul. Instead of being a network of friends, and friends of friends it became a network of adverts and influencers. I dumped the network because I no longer derived pleasure from the network.
Now onto Twitter. Musk “… tweeted that he hoped his worst critics would remain on twitter because ‘that is what free speech means.'”. Free speech isn’t about whether we stay on a platform or leave. It is about the freedom to be on a network that is not owned by someone we do not trust. It is about being on a network that is not owned by a temperamental individual. It is about being on a platform we trust, with values we cherish. I do not value the US values of “free speech”, I value the European ones, that include accountability. Remember the first line of the New York times’ article is “The world’s richest mansucceeded in a bid to acquire the influential social networking service, which he has said he wants to take private.”
Anyone valuing democracy should be worried by that sentence. Within the article they say that Twitter has 220 million daily users. He would take the conversation of 220 million people, and control the network they use, privately. This should not be possible.
Mr. Musk has made some of his intentions clear in regulatory filings, tweets and public appearances: The company must scrap nearly all of its moderation policies, which ban content like violent threats, harassment and spam. It must provide more transparency about the algorithm it uses to boost tweets in users’ newsfeeds. And it must become a private company.
I will finally leave you with the quote above. Do you want to be on a social network without moderation? I do not. That’s why I don’t use other platforms. I am ready to leave twitter, when the time comes. I have been ready to do so for years.
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