NBC News
NBC News
Or: how to get minimal utility out of $44 billion.
Nieman Reports
Nieman ReportsThese strategies move publishers further away from seeing social media as a source of clicks. This could be a risky pivot away from traffic sources, given that NPR and many member stations have laid off staff or made other cuts due to declining revenues. But the social media clickthrough audience has never been guaranteed; a Facebook algorithm change this year also tanked traffic to news sites. Instead, recognizing that social media is not a key to clicks seems like a correction to years of chasing traffic through outside platforms.Nice confirmation that the social media effort wasn't and isn't worth the return for news orgs. You're building someone else's platform—and they're platforms that can rug-pull at any moment because their profits aren't directly tied to that organization-generated content.
Washington Post
Washington Post“Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away,” he wrote. “Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform.”LOL. Twitter is absolutely the brand I think of when I think long form content. (sarcasm)
Salon.com
Salon.com"Grifters need people to harass and a mainstream discourse to counter. As traffic takes a nosedive and Twitter becomes less a part of the conversation, it's going to be harder for these folks to make money," Melissa Ryan, a strategist who helps counter online disinformation, told Salon.Grifters and trolls will eventually show up where people are. One question we should all ask when we’re thinking about where to spend our online social time: how resistant is it to grifters and trolls? Do we have tools/moderation available to deal with them when they do?
davetroy.medium.com
davetroy.medium.comMusk and the people backing all this are more interested in reshaping the global order than in earning fake “fiat currency.” Their real goal is to usher in “hard currency” and re-base global currencies around scarcity and physical assets. So no it really doesn’t matter much what happens to Twitter’s ad model in the meantime. It will probably do alright, and they can probably find other ways to make money, like adding in payments and weird Dogecoin schemes.Yeah, this article by Dave Troy from last October was not only prescient but has timely reasons why Twitter and Bluesky might not be the competitors you think they are.
crookedtimber.org
crookedtimber.orgGood prophets know how to inspire the zeal of the faithful. They don’t necessarily have the social and political nous to deal with unbelievers, or to reach grudging but necessary accommodations with them. Often, indeed, disagreement is treated as being tantamount to heresy. Nor are prophets good at working with routines, which are antithetical both to their self image and their style of operation.I have been thinking about this priest and prophet dichotomy since I read this post and I'm seeing it everywhere. It's like the tension between tech innovation and maintenance personified. Plus the phrase routinization of charisma has been giving me good brain dissonance.
IEEE Spectrum
IEEE Spectrum"Mastodon, a text-based social network similar to Twitter, is the most popular example of ActivityPub in action. Users can post text, share images, and follow others. But Mastodon, unlike Twitter, is not hosted as a singular service but instead a collection of independent servers that communicate through ActivityPub. Joining Mastodon means joining a server with its own community and code of conduct. Users can interact with users on other servers, but their account is hosted on the server they choose."Nice intro to Mastodon here. And speaking of apps, I have been using Ivory as my main mobile Mastodon app for a while now and I'm enjoying it more than the official app. It's great to have so many options.
Wired
Wired"How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much. Their smartphones are six versions behind and have badly cracked screens. They fix bicycles, then they talk about fixing bicycles, then they show their friend, who just came over for no reason, how they fixed their bicycle, and their friend says, “Wow, good job,” and they make tea. That doesn’t seem like enough to build a town square on."That sounds delightful, but doesn't scale. I would like to quote every sentence in this piece by Paul Ford. The scattering!
Washington Post
"In another example, an ad for the streaming service Peacock appeared next to a tweet from Anthime Gionet, an influencer known as Baked Alaska, who was recently sentenced for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The ad appeared next to a tweet where Gionet asked his followers whether he should “say the n-word.”"Twitter is toxic for people so it's a toxic place to build brands.
API Evangelist
API Evangelist"This makes me wonder what it would be like if I decided to take all my API evangelism superpowers and unionize all of the public API developers out there and ask them to stop working for free. Do not sign up for any new APIs. Do not work for free. I don’t care how interesting an API is, your time is too valuable."The it’s just business! argument doesn’t ring true when companies expect free public work to build private value.
Bloomberg
Bloomberg"...some internet policy experts say the company’s new direction has exposed the drawbacks of public agencies becoming over-reliant on private platforms, and that issues like the D.C. bus system’s mysterious deactivation could pave the way for a more publicly managed alternative."Fingers crossed, I guess. It seems like public agencies are more than happy to hand off the problem of managing servers and paying developers to corporations. Unfortunately our public infrastructure suffers in the process. If you can only see important public information though a barrage of advertising and misinformation are these agencies still serving the public?
Platformer
Platformer"Now, awaiting Musk’s latest tweets, I find myself anxious that one of his former employees could be physically assaulted or worse over what the CEO is posting. I don’t know how, in that environment, to make little jokes about Google’s latest failed messaging app, or bad PR pitches, or any of the other bits I have been doing on Twitter forever. I don’t know how to pretend that what is happening is not actually happening. I don’t want to provide, even in the smallest of ways, a respectable backdrop against which hate speech against my fellow LGBTQ people, or Black or Jewish or any other people, can flourish."Go for the bot mishap but stay for the excellent personal reporting in It’s time to start leaving Twitter behind.