A few weeks ago I received an invite to BlueSky, the kinda-sorta federated version of Twitter. (Thanks, Ian.) It has been talked about—elsewhere—as the obvious alternative to Twitter, and invited a number of big-name people such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, so famous she’s just known by her initials, and dril (you gotta hand it to him) and Chrissy Teigen.
So I tried it out. You can try the firehose. It has the capability to quote-tweet content. (Despite its potential to be used to dunk on people, I do think that the quote tweet is the best invention in social discourse online since the up/downvote, which I think goes back to some dim distant past of the web.) You get three columns: “Following”, “What’s Hot” and “Popular With Friends”.
And then the work starts. Oh my, the work. What work, you ask? The work of choosing who to follow. This is the slog that I do not want to have to go through all over again. And this is why Twitter is not, despite all the people who hate Elon Musk to a greater or lesser degree, dead in terms of engagement even if its finances are a bit rocky.
I’ve joined so many social media sites down the years. Facebook and Twitter, of course, the OGs back in 2006 or so. And Instagram. Then there was Google+, the Great Experiment, back in 2011, which was painful from the start because it demanded that you separate your contacts into “Circles” of family, friends, acquaintances, business contacts, other interests, oh god make it stop. If it had been the only network in the world? OK, maybe then. As the bazillionth arrival? No thank you. Of course, one’s reluctance to put all your contacts into their own special silo then leads to context collapse, where you make a comment intended for your family and friends that your coworker finds in some way unwelcome, and everything gets very uncomfortable. (You witness this when someone gets promoted to a new job and Twitter’s army digs through their old tweets and finds something incriminating or embarrassing, at which point everyone stands back to see whether they’ll spontaneously combust or just brazen it out.)
My tolerance for re-following a ton of people on Bluesky had already had the edge taken off it by the experience of re-following a ton of people on Mastodon last autumn, after Musk broke the then-extant version of Twitter by blocking third-party apps. I didn’t hurry to do it, even though the experience of not using Tweetbot (my favoured app) was horrendous. But when, finally, I did, there was all the slog once again. It was made a lot easier by some of the interstitial apps which would scan the bios of people you follow on Twitter and, if they found a Mastodon reference there, offer to let you follow them. (I can’t remember the name of them, because after a while Twitter blocked them from accessing its API.)
Those apps at least helped to build my list to follow, but you’re still stuck with the fact that it feels like a large, empty room because compared to what you’ve come from, it is a large empty room. Are the people who you used to follow elsewhere here? If they’re here, are they active? Are there new people who you want to follow? (No. The answer is no. There are no new people on social media who are on a network you’ve paid no attention to who you discover to be founts of wisdom.)
I tried Mastodon, and paid for Ivory, the iOS client, but the experience was always lacking for me. Ditto for Bluesky: until it gets a lot busier, there’s not a lot to say. Again, the answer to “who’s there who you never saw before but who you want to follow?” is: nobody.
And that’s the problem for all the alternatives. Twitter long ago sucked all the air out of the room; if you want a principally text-based network where you can also do a lot of other things (post pictures, post videos, find people, find celebrities) then your first choice is Twitter, and your second choice is also Twitter. Even if it’s not where all the people are—the defections to Mastodon and Bluesky have included some people who I enjoyed following, but they’re far less active now—it’s where many of the people are. I tried, but the grass wasn’t greener.
Even if it were still possible to grab people’s Contacts lists, as Clubhouse did, and as used to be commonplace for new apps, you’d still find the participation problem. You can follow all the accounts that you like, but if people aren’t posting, or aren’t posting things you want to read and interact with, it’s not much use. Hence, Twitter.
However, I’m going to mute or mark “not interested” on the absurd number of ads that appear on the main feed; no point not annoying Musk. And an observation: have you seen how you never get ads in Lists? Why if you built a List consisting of all the people who you follow?
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here.)
• “AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born”. James Vincent at The Verge, who has been staying on top of the rise of AI, points out that we’re essentially at the tsunami tipping point—think of it as the moment in Interstellar where Matthew Mconaughey looks up at the wave, and you know what words are in his mind—where a growing number of sites are springing up and they have junk content written by, surprise, chatbots.
• AI-generated books of nonsense are all over Amazon's bestseller lists. That’s the Kindle bestsellers, and only in America it seems, and only briefly: but even so
Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited young adult romance bestseller list was filled with dozens of AI-generated books of nonsense on Monday and Tuesday. As of Wednesday morning, Amazon appeared to have taken action against the books, but the episode shows that people are spamming AI-generated nonsense to the platform and are finding a way to monetize it.
One has to wonder how long Amazon can hold out against this.
• How easy is it to fool AI detection tools? Pretty easy, really. The arms race always means the detection is going to be behind the development of the tools themselves, and the AI will improve until it’s so good that it’s as good as the best human, or better; at which point maybe that’s when you detect it, because it’s so good.
• AI-generated child sex images spawn new nightmare for the web. Self-explanatory, unfortunately. This is a grim business. Obviously it’s illegal for people to create and possess this stuff. Obviously there’s a trade (also illegal) in the images. What I wonder is whether the prompts to create the images are illegal: that would be a bizarre loophole.
• Doctors like AI to.. fill out boring paperwork. This seems like a sensible way to use the transcription system: some GPs I spoke to while on holiday recently said that having to do routine examination of prescriptions and responses from hospitals essentially wastes a lot of their time. You could have trained humans do it, and you could get machines to do it if they’re good enough.
• A magazine called Bankrate started using AI (again..?) to write articles, and they’re stuffed full of factual errors, as Futurism (which first noticed this) pointed out.
• Midjourney has updated its system, and now incorporates Zoom Out, and it’s amazing. Here’s an example in a tweet. Wowsers.
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.
• I’m the proposed Class Representative for a lawsuit against Google in the UK on behalf of publishers. If you sold open display ads in the UK after 2014, you might be a member of the class. Read more at Googleadclaim.co.uk. (Or see the press release.)
• Please leave a comment here, or in the Substack chat, or Substack Notes, or write it in a letter and put it in a bottle so that The Police write a song about it after it falls through a wormhole and goes back in time.
Also, if your post has been up ~20 hours with two comments .. maybe Notes should go ahead and join the fediverse. For the engagement.
I think Mastodon might be nice for normies. Define that as people with less than whatever followers. Not clout chasers.
You can have a conversation with people interested in geology or fly fishing or whatever.
Maybe they are not the most exciting people in the world (defined again by follower count) but does really matter?