In 2006-2007 I would have payed for Twitter and/or facebook, but not now. Both of them say “pay, to prove that you’re a human being”. For as long as I have been on Facebook I have used my real name. I authenticated myself by using my university e-mail address. Back then you need an educational e-mail address to be verified. it’s only with time that the barriers to entry collapsed.
Back in the good old days of Twitter the length of a tweet was limited to the length of an SMS. The aim was to make it possible for people to tweet and have conversations using GSM phones. With short messages we could leave the keyboard behind and read messages on our mobile phones.
Jaiku was similar except that it was more advanced, having an app that played well with Symbian devices. With time, and the advent of the iphone and ubiquitous data plans so platforms like Twitter and Jaiku could add images and more. With time Seesmic experimented with video and instagram with images. Instagram thrived because it made uploading and sharing images fast and easy, even in the days of limited bandwidth.
Social networks and social networks are based on people connecting with other people. Twitter is a glorified chatroom masquerading as a microblogging platform. As twitter shifts from being free, to being paying, it is losing it’s appeal.
Fifteen years ago there was plenty of discussion about Social Media silos and the social graph, and discussion about ROI for businesses, PR firms and personalities. They always forgot about the user. They exploit the user because the user, in their eyes, is an addict. This attitude make it okay to exploit social media users, in their eyes.
Twitter has a new For You page inspired by TikTok’s For you page according to Quartz. Many years ago we had Seesmic, a video chat community where people could share video messages 24 hours a day. We even experimented with recording videos and sharing them by phone when this was still novel.
Tik Tok has a critical flaw, as do plenty of the more popular social networks. As someone said on Mastodon today, “You have to be fast to say something new, before hundreds of other people have posted every possible reaction. That is what’s wrong with social networks today. I use social networks because I think social media is an awful term, used to encourage abuses rather than empathy.
I took a short twitter detox for two days. For two days I didn’t look at tweets, replies and more. For two days if I wanted to rant I couldn’t. For two days I couldn’t see replies. For two days I couldn’t read people complain.
It is good to take a break from twitter sometimes. I don’t believe in social media addiction. Social media is a conversation. If you can get addicted to having conversations then the world is messed up. Twitter is a social network, not an addiction.
For the first time since I took a Twitter break in 2007 I am taking another in 2023. The first time I took a twitter break I deleted my account but got asked to talk about Twitter for the RTS (TSR) back then so I went to my secondary account and started using twitter again. Since then I have continued to love and hate twitter in equal measure.
I don’t like that a billionaire could just buy Twitter because of a bet he made with web users on another site. I don’t like that no government system could stop him from making the purchase. I also don’t like that the board of directors didn’t block the acquisition.
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.
Let’s take a step back from today, and let’s remember the 2006 tech landscape. In 2006 we had Symbian phones, GPRS, text messages. We used the world wide web whilst sitting at computers usually via wifi. We would tweet until the moment we left home, and then we had to rely on SMS to keep in touch with people that we either wanted to meet or communicate with.
At the time phones were small, with just a few lines of text at a time, and little to no media content. We used Twitter and Jaiku because they allowed us, in a time of limited bandwidth, to have a conversation either, sitting at a computer, or by SMS.
Since 2006 I have thought of Twitter, Jaiku, Mastodon and Plurk as conversation channels, rather than microblogging. I go to these places and use them as chatroooms rather than microblogs. If I want to blog I have my full scale blog. This website, to keep me entertained.
I bring this up because at lunchtime today, the time at which I usually get tired with social media, two people frustrated me. One person asked for what reason Musk should have been stopped from buying twitter. The second said that without hashtags they wouldn’t be able to find content on Mastodon.
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.