Twitter: The Rise of the Personal Question That Isn’t

Byrichard

Recently I have noticed individuals tweeting as if they were people, asking questions and getting 120 or more comments. They ask a question like “What was your first OS” or “What is your current setup” or other questions. These are generic questions that everyone has an answer to, so everyone answers to them. Those answering think either that they will get a personal answer back, or that they will increase their visibility by answering to these questions where no one cares about the answer, except marketers.


These questions are simple, and brilliant in their deceptiveness. They give the illusion of a personal question, but require no timeline reading, no investment of time or attention. Just broadcast a generic question, and wait for answers.


When I see that a tweet has three hundred answers I usually don’t bother to answer. I look for one on one conversations that may expand to four or five people, but no more. I have no interest in listening to a crowd that does not listen back, and by listen I mean read tweets.


I come from the age of chatrooms and web forums, an age where we were part of communities where everyone knew our name. I come from the Cheers age of the web. “Hello everyone”, “Hey norm”. An age where presence and time meant visibility, rather than algorithm seduction.


The accounts that I start to see more and more, are just noise. They don’t give me a reason to spend hours on the web. They give me a desire to do something else.


This morning I did do something else. Clothes washing, looking at kindles and learning about what service workers can do, by a four year old course that seems out of date. It wasn’t part of learning path I would have dumped it and moved on. I find it hard to watch courses where I can’t get practical experience. I will find relevant information to put the theory I am learning, into practice.


And that’s it for today.

A 2000 Year old Greek Mosaic in Turkey

A 2000 Year old Greek Mosaic in Turkey

Byrichard

I like archeological twitter because it shows us curiousities every day of the week, several times a day. I like the image of the mosaic below because you see that it was quite deep, and hidden. Imagine digging down and coming across such a sight and site.


https://twitter.com/Artifacthub_/status/1495459408184487936


More info


https://twitter.com/Artifacthub_/status/1494925862394687488

Keir Starmer’s Speech Today

Byrichard

This speech reminds us that English democracy is not gone, that there are moral people still around, and that we need to get the current Tory government out of power and go back to having leadership worthy of respect.


When you are at events you listen to speech after speech, and they meld into each other. Occasionally you hear speeches that stand out and are worth sharing. This is one of them. It reflects values that have recently been lost in several countries. We need to revert to good moral values. Pandemics are a marathon, not a sprint.


https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1488180224667832320

High Winds And A Skipped Walk

High Winds And A Skipped Walk

Byrichard

There is a cold wind blowing today so I skipped my daily walk. I can dress for the weather and I am usually fine. Today I simply decided to miss my daily walk. I believe that walking whatever the weather, whatever the wind, and whatever the precipitation is good. I also believe that it fatigues us. For this reason it makes sense, sometimes, to stay indoors, and focus on studying or spending money on things we don’t need.


Early Sunsets


One of the problems with winter, aside from cold weather and finding a valid excuse is short days. When days are short you spend daylight working towards your goals, and by the time you’re free to go out the sun has set. It sets at 1720 at the moment so a one and a half hour walk requires going at three in the afternoon at the latest. Today I missed the window of opportunity.


Studies


I finished a course on closures in JavaScript today and I played around with creating a function to convert from knots to kilometres an hour. The first version was simple and had no interactivity but the second version, by copying someone else’s code works. I always make sure to credit the source from which I am learning. The next topic will be JavaScript Classes.


Android and iOS


I revived my android phone and tried Google Pay and it works very well but then tried Android car play or whatever it is called and that worked badly. In fact it didn’t work, so I feel that unless I swap the car, or go for what could be an expensive car os upgrade I might as well stick with Apple despite not being enthused with the platform at the moment. I wish switching the two could be as easy as a dual boot computer or laptop. Choose one, or the other, and everything is smooth. Unfortunately you need to commit to one or the other.


Playing With Tweetdeck


Recently I grew tired of seeing tweets that fill the entire screen. Twitter is meant to be a microblogging platform, not FaceBook. One way to avoid seeing tweets that fill the entire screen is to use Tweetdeck.twitter.com. It allows you to see as many lists and columns as you want. You can use the number keys to change between views. I believe that the decision to design for mobile first is a mistake, in the current web landscape, but is worth exploring in another blog post.



Zero Minutes Per Week on Facebook

Zero Minutes Per Week on Facebook

Byrichard

I noticed that Facebook has a way of letting you know how badly you are addicted to their website. In the process I learned that I spent zero minutes on their website this week, and one minute last week. I do not spend time on their website because it fails to provide me with a community that I want to interact with on a daily basis. There are a number of reasons for this but the key reason is that they spent so much effort trying to make the timeline more addictive that they made it repulsive.


Irrelevant Content from Algorithms


The timeline is repulsive because it shows too many adverts, whether for groups, for products, for promoted posts and more. These are irrelevant, and if shown at too high a rate they become toxic. They also stop you from seeing the content that you want to engage with, i.e. posts by friends. Facebook has become a network of strangers talking to strangers, and noise. We see others, but we are not seen. If that is toxic to me, imagine the impact on others. Instagram, too, has this flaw.


Questionable Morals


The second reason is to do with Facebook’s reputation for enabling, or at least not removing extremist content for months or even seasons. They sometimes seem to remove it once it is no longer needed, rather than when it causes the most damage.


FOMO and trolling


The two strongest push factors were FOMO and trolling. Facebook had a way of reminding us that not everyone is self isolating during this pandemic, or of reminding us that not everyone is in solitude. When you are not conversing with people, you are only seeing an idealised representation of their lives, then you begin to feel down about your own life. It makes you wish the pandemic would end, so that you could resume socialising, meeting people, and maybe even having something, other than social media, to come home to.


The second one was virulent trolling. In normal times you would put up with communities where you are being trolled because you can still plan activities in the physical world. During a pandemic however, if you get trolled you have no reason to put up with it, and a survival strategy is to leave the community. Eventually I took a serious break from twitter that has lasted for almost the entire pandemic.


Not A Social Media Detox


What I am writing about is not a social media detox. My aim is not to take a break from social media. My aim was to take a break from, and cut ties with a community that is toxic, both through the ways it pushes rubbish into your timelines, but also by the toxic people that interact on the platform. When you are flamed twice within the space of days, and when you are tired of scrolling through irrelevant content, you eventually decide that the Return on Investment, ROI, as a user, is less than it is worth to keep using a service.


I have had the same realisation with Instagram, which is part of the same problematic social network. Meta. Everything Meta touches, becomes unhealthy for users to use, and now they want to go into the metaverse. I will not use AR and VR via such a company. They do not have the required moral standards for me to trust them with something immersive.


One of the drawbacks to dumping Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other products, is that you become disconnected from the social networks that have the biggest monopoly. If you do not use these networks you are socially excluded. Too many products are built off of Facebook’s user login system now. You lose access to some apps, web services, and to some communities. During a pandemic this contributes to the sense of isolation.


I Don’t Miss Either


I don’t miss either Facebook or Instagram because they stopped being about a network of friends years ago. They became more and more of a waste of time, and more of a way to see how I wish my life was different. That would be positive, if we were all on the same life path, but we are not, especially during the pandemic. The standard model life that we saw on Facebook and Instagram stopped being real. It became an unhealthy illusion. It also led to a sense of isolation. That sense of isolation is why a Facebook and Instagram break was needed. You don’t long for a different life every day. You can more easily live in the moment.


Very Few Interactions


One thing that hurt, when I used Facebook, but also Instagram, was seeing other people get twenty or more likes, and getting conversations started via their content. Seeing that I was being ignored was painful, but it also led me to another thought. If I am being ignored on FB and IG, where I am giving them my attention, and content for free, then I might as well give over that time to my blog, and at least this way I achieve something positive. It gets very little attention, but it is “me time” as you would see many people say. It is time that I devote to thinking, and writing. In effect I am practicing mindfulness.


A Lifestyle, Not An Addiction


For years I have argued that social media and social networks should be about a lifestyle rather than an addiction. Google and Twitter, although flawed, in some ways, do not treat us like addicts. They treat us like individuals, and the same is true of Wordpress.com. We are a community of writers and commenters, who write, and occassionally people read what we have written. Sometimes they even comment. The goal isn’t to have a conversation. The aim is to read about someone else’s experiences. The web should be a healthy place, to talk online, while waiting for another opportunity to meet offline, as it was in 2006-2007.


How To Block Twitter and Facebook Using The Hosts File On A Mac.

Byrichard

If we’re not learning every day then we’re wasting our time. If we’re not up to mischief every day then we’re likely to become unhappy. In light of both of these things let me give you a quick tip for blocking Twitter and Facebook.


My motivation for doing this is the following. Twitter doesn’t trust us with the retweet button so we can take a three or four week break from them. Facebook is dormant, so experimenting with them will have little effect.


The first step is to type “sudo nano /private/etc/hosts”. The Hosts file is a file that the computer uses as a DNS lookup. It is useful to tell computers on a local network where to find the intranet site, or to give IP addresses for sites or servers that do not have a human readable address.


127.0.01 is the localhost default address. So is ::1. The long one is IPV4 and the short one, ironically is IPV6.


By adding a line like 192.168.1.1 Twitter.com we are telling the computer that the URL www.twitter.com’s IP address is 192.168.1.1 which is wrong. On plenty of networks this is the wifi router. The result is that twitter will no longer load. For additional fun I decided to make www.facebook.com resolve to 20.20.10.21. The IP address was arrived at through the highly scientific process of thinking “What is today’s date, let’s use that.”


The last step is “dscacheutil -flushcache” to ensure that DNS addresses address according to the latest host file.


www.facebook.com now resolves to the wrong IP address.


For a while i was trying to think of ways to block myself from accessing these websites. I tried one website blocking plugin but it blocked access to an entire range of websites that I still wanted access to.


A more serious look at how to modify hosts files.


If for some reason one day you are unable to access a website after typing in the URL you can resolve the issue by the following:


  1. Check www.google.com or some other URL to see whether the problem is with just one site or whether it is widespread.
  2. Open terminal on a mac and ping the website that is not loading. If you see an IP address that does not look right then you can check the hosts file with the sudo command mentioned above. If you know that an IP address for a URL is wrong then you simply delete the line, save, flush the cache and then reload.


Opening the cache, modifying the file, saving it, checking that it works, reopening the file, removing the change takes seconds per manipulation.

|

The Roman Civilisation On Twitter

Byrichard

The Roman Civilisation is being tweeted about on Twitter. There are accounts that tweet about ongoing archeological digs, museum opening times and more. They also share images and videos, providing people with a visual way of learning about the Romans.


One of these twitter accounts is Roman Britain. They tweet original content as well as retweet content written by other accounts. It is an interesting way to learn more about Roman Britain. Such accounts are interesting because they open our eyes to lesser known sites that may go unnoticed. It also provides us with a glimpse of locations that may be nearby that we were not yet aware of.


You can also follow hashtags to see tweets about specific aspects of the Romans. For example if you look for Mithras you can follow tweets about Mithraism. When I was learning about the Romans we needed to go to books and find chapters about the topics we wanted to learn about. Today, with twitter information can be found within seconds from a variety of sources, whether wikipedia, newspaper articles, new research papers, content on documentary streaming sites or more.


With a hashtag like archeology you can see news and tweets about ongoing archeological digs and even find opportunities to comment on or discuss current findings with the archeologists as they research the topics they are studying or exploring.


Although history is about the past, this does not mean that research and new findings are not emerging. We have often been to recent archeological digs and seen fresh finds. When you visit Pompei or Herculaneo you see sites that are so large that they take lifetimes to excavate.


History is not just limited to books and old websites that are rarely updated. It is dynamic, so if you know children, or students encourage them to look up resources that provide them with constantly updated sources of new sites, knowledge and more.

Of Twitter Threads (mice) and Blog Posts (Humans).

Byrichard

With the sentence “Of Twitter threads (Mice) and Blog Posts (Humans)” you’ll see that I’ve done two things. The first is that I’ve modernised a well-known book title to draw parallels with the practices of writing Twitter threads and blog posts.


People write twitter threads because they think that it’s fast, convenient, will draw an audience and it’s trendy. It keeps people within the same site. No browsing between platforms and websites. There is the notion that people do not want to leave the social networks where they find themselves. Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks are portals, except that once you’re inside your trapped.


The beauty of writing threads is that it’s easy. You only need two hundred characters per tweet. You don’t need to develop and justify your ideas as you would with a blog post. Twitter threads are fleeting. Within a few minutes, they’re gone.


Blog posts, in contrast, requires your inspiration to last. You look at that empty window and you see an insurmountable challenge. You see three hundred words as a challenge not worth attempting. That’s how I often feel about blogging, and that’s why I usually write after a day of sports or other activities. It’s easy to write when the story exists and you’re just remembering it.


By blogging rather than writing twitter threads you’re pushing yourself to learn to write. The more you write the more ideas flow, and the more ideas flow the easier it is to go back and edit. The fear of the blank page dissipates, as does the lack of consistent inspiration.


Another feature of writing a blog post rather than a twitter thread is that you have time to think. There are no updates, no “press to refresh” and other distractions. From the moment you start to write until the moment you run out of momentum you are focused.


The length of my blog posts, and the quality of my writing have improved. I’m taking longer and longer breaks from social media. I’m reverting from a distracted individual who doesn’t follow curiousity to one that explores more.


If you’re worried about being distracted then reading twitter threads will not resolve this issue. You read two or three posts in a thread and see a reply that will take you in another direction, before returning to the original stream of thought.


Contrast this to a blog post. If, and when you skim Wordpress and other websites you’re seeing each post and their description before clicking and reading that post for a few minutes. You are fully engaged with the message that the writer wants to share. You then share that post, and people will read it as easily as you did.


Jaiku had threading, but similar to bulletin boards. Twitter’s algorithm fed threads promote the people and threads that make noise without anyone conversing, rather than the other way around.


If you’re inspired and have something to say then blogging is a fantastic avenue because as you’re learning to write with a voice there is a small audience, and as your voice gets stronger, and as your writing improves, so will your audience. In contrast, writing twitter threads gives the illusion of being a writer. You’re getting the attention, but writing snippets.


There is an exception to that rule, of course, poetry. If you’re a poet, and I am not, then Twitter might be an excellent avenue.

|

Keeping Twitter Private

Byrichard

Twitter has three options. You can tweet to the world without barriers and anyone can read and respond. This is great when you want to grow your network and have conversations. The second option is to send DMs to specific individuals or groups (if I remember correctly). The third option is to make your account private. The only people can read your tweets are the people who were following you when you made the account private.


The weakness of a private account is that twitter is a social medium and as such any time we @ or retweet someone they will be unable to see our answers. Any answer we write to those people will be unseen and so we will be tweeting in the wind.


My two reasons for keeping twitter private are:


A) More freedom. If we approve the people who can read what we write we can first warn them that we may be cheeky. We may something that we only think for long enough to write a tweet, and by the time it’s published we have already changed our mind.


B) The people we’re tweeting with are also private. If we answer a private tweet publicly then people may intuit what the conversation is about. We could use another IM platform but WhatsApp is part of Facebook and other IM networks have their own problems. People tend to be spread across platforms.


Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are three different types of social networks. LinkedIn is serious. I keep my profile up to date but not much more. Facebook is the network of former university friends. Due to this, I need to trust those I add. When twitter was a network of friends waiting to meet at tweetups everyone was accountable to the community so everyone had reason to behave a specific way. Now that trolls, hashtags and other issues are present keeping an account private keeps them away.


140+ characters is excellent to tell people how we feel but terrible for context. Blogging, forums and other long-form discussion websites are better suited to being public because you spend half an hour to an hour developing your idea, modifying it, and then sharing. That is long enough for an irrational tweet to become a rational post.


I’d rather have one to three blog posts by the end of a given day, than twenty-five to two hundred tweets. ;-). I haven’t tweeted like that in years for a reason.