If you strike me down, I shall come back for a nice cold beer
Plus the actors obliged to speak an awful AI script, and more
One thing that perhaps doesn’t get discussed enough is the resilience of social networks, and the remarkable inertia that they show when people try to inflict change on them.
Take Instagram, which started out as a social network where you could post your photos, and build up an asymmetric social network of people you wanted to follow, and people who wanted to follow you; the two groups didn’t have to be the same. Instagram launched in October 2010, and took off like a kite in a hurricane, zooming past 10 million users in one year, and being acquired by Facebook (as it was then known) for its 30 million users for $1bn in April 2012—a price that many people found puzzling; the commentariat couldn’t quite work out the attraction (though they were pretty sure it was something to do with photos, well done people. My take seems to have been that maybe this “social” thing would help it along.)
Fast forward, and Instagram has zoomed past a billion users, and Facebook/Meta has definitely figured out how to monetise it, to the extent that there’s suspicion that Instagram—or IG as it’s more commonly known—is actually the profit centre out of the Facebook/IG/WhatApp triumvirate.
And yet when you open the app, what do you see? Photos. Sure, there are “Stories” along the top. But the main feed that you see is photos, or photo frames with video. A user from 2010 would recognise it, perhaps with some delight at the evolution that has made video completely routine, rather than the vague obsession we used to have about which filter we’d apply to a picture. Oh sure, once you scroll a little further there’s a carousel of “Reels”, which are more short videos. However, the skeleton of the app remains unchanged, as does the way it works (or doesn’t, depending on your viewpoint) to engage you. IG has always been viewed as a place filled with relentless positivity, which made it something of a shock when it was blamed for the suicide of Molly Russell. The company made efforts to improve the app after that calamity. But at its heart it’s an image-driven asymmetrical social network, with all that implies.
Note how Facebook, ostensibly a symmetrical social network—we become “Friends” who follow each other—builds in asymmetry through Groups, where anyone can join and interact; Groups were identified by Mark Zuckerberg as a crucial component for increasing interaction in the app when interest seemed to be tailing off, as I explained in Social Warming, chapter 3:
Even if we didn’t go bowling together, we could at least discuss it in a Facebook Group. In June 2017, [Zuckerberg] set a target of getting one billion people to join ‘meaningful’ Groups; to help that project, Group content was given more prominent placement in the News Feed.
(One could conclude that there’s something about asymmetry that social networks find useful. It mimics how we deal with the world: we passively “follow” lots of output that we choose, and interact symmetrically with a far smaller group.)
The joy of asymmetry
Which brings me on to eX-Twitter. Yes, Elon Musk bought it, in case you hadn’t heard. He unVerified all the people who had been Verified as being who they said they were, in favour of taking money from people who wanted to Verify via a blue tick that they are willing to give money to the richest man in the world. He brought back a lot of people who had previously been suspended (though not, I note in passing, all of them).
But he didn’t meddle with the underlying structure of the network. It’s asymmetrical. You can, if you have inexplicably paid for a blue tick and are even more inexplicably Bill Ackman, write enormously long tweets (up to 25,000 characters! That’s about 4,160 words!) that nobody will read. But most people remain within the 280 (about 45 words) we’ve had since November 2017, up from the original 140.
Lots of people feel that Musk has really, to use the technical term, arsed things up. The algorithm in the “For You” tab has been tweaked to amplify the Verified people and Elon Musk and to pick tweets from people calculated, quite literally, to annoy you. (This is why I never go on the For You tab, but people’s tastes differ.)
Yet despite this, and a ton of people having been fired, somehow the lights remain on, and the network just about routes tweets where they’re meant to go within a vaguely reasonable time. Sure, the sexbots have multiplied like cockroaches (banish them from your Notifications with this one not-even-slightly-weird trick), and you can’t use third-party apps any more, and there are fewer people who you’d like to see on there because they have migrated to Threads, or Bluesky, or Mastodon.
And yet.
The essential character of Twitter remains. Bear in mind what that is:
And certainly, there’s main character-ing in abundance still to be found. But there’s also a counterpoint, which has been there for ages alongside the main character drama, and provides a reason to keep using it.
Which is: uniting everyone in enjoyment. There were two instances this week which drove this point home to me.
First was a little chunk of film, embedded in this tweet:
I watched with no idea what was going to happen, and then yelped with laughter at the reveal at 30 seconds. It is unbelievably funny. I couldn’t believe it was real, but actually—who cared? Even if it wasn’t real, it was hilarious.
But it got better: this is real, and what’s more, Twitter rapidly turned up more and more clips, which Windy added in: they aren’t only in the original film, and there’s a supercut (with the original English soundtrack) here on YouTube. I watched them all again and laughed just as much as the first time, and wondered what the advertising execs who put it together thought: great job, guys or it had to be done? (There’s a whole backstory to be discovered there.) Also I wanted to see more of the films with those, and any other commercials edited in. I think that it would improve Star Wars immeasurably if they were basically reedited to just be product placement vehicles. The dialogue would probably be improved a lot too.
So there’s Twitter, throwing up #content to surprise and delight. This happens all the time. There are still enough random people out there, and enough variety in the world, to create serendipity all the time.
The second incident was entirely about Twitter behaviour. First, the tweet:
First reply: BBC London, asking if it would be OK to use his images in its coverage. “Yes, that’s absolutely fine,” Mark replied. Then London Live, same question. Yes, fine, says Mark.
And then a little later, from Dan Falvey: “Hi Mark, hope you’re okay. Can GB News use this image for our coverage? - with credit of course.”
Mark’s response: “No, I don’t want anything to do with GB News. You don’t have my permission.”
Yellow bus, blue touch paper
This seems to have been the response that lit the blue touch paper: suddenly, as well as news organisations hoping Mark was okay (he hadn’t been on the bus, so yes) and asking if they could use his picture, with credit, people were playing around with the entire “hope you’re ok, can I use your picture to…” format. This Poke article captures many of the funnier ones (don’t miss the The Smiths one). Are people witty? Yes, given the right incentive—which is that there’s nothing to gain apart from having some fun.
And to make it even better: the photos of the bus crash that The Poke used aren’t Mark’s photos. And they haven’t credited anyone for them.
Buried in the Instagram purchase article that I wrote, linked above, is a quote of what Dick Costolo, one of the phonebook of former Twitter CEOs, cooked up as the network’s mission statement: “To instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them.” I think the “instantly” bit isn’t there any more, and he wasn’t quite right about the “most important” part. What we want is: to be connected with the most enjoyable content. And Twitter can still do that. That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.
(Even as I wrote this piece, a new piece of the most amazing content crossposted from Reddit appeared. Go and knock yourself out. Best film of 2024? Well, I didn’t need to buy a ticket for it.)
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here. And then the update.)
• The “Not Very Willy Wonka” script from the Glasgow-based extremely failed “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” er, experience bears all the hallmarks of having been written by AI, “including the nonsensical decision to include lines for audience members and descriptions of the crowd’s reaction, as though it’s happening in real-time”. (Or just a really bad scriptwriter. Though I can’t imagine how much of what drug you’d need to write that script.)
• TurboTax and H&R Block have AI chatbots which ostensibly will help Americans fill out their tax returns by advising on tax liabilities and exceptions. Only one problem: they get it wrong anywhere between 30% and 50% of the time. When are they wrong? Ask a tax consultant!
• Automattic, the company behind Wordpress, offered AI companies a “firehose” of about a million daily posts from people posting on the wordpress.com site to ingest. It’s also planning to do the same with Tumblr, the cold dead potato that Automattic has struggled to monetise, just like all the site’s previous owners.
• CNet’s use of AI to write articles means it is no longer considered a “reliable source” by Wikipedia, which means there won’t be linkbacks in future from the biggest nonprofit (and, in many ways, biggest source of SEO) on the web. Rather than “go woke, go broke” is this “Go AI and die”?
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