DMMWIWD makes a lot of sense to me. I've been in numerous bands, ran a record label, and put on a city-wide music fest for three years, and the lengths I had to go to on Facebook just to get to have my ACTUAL FRIENDS see my posts was ridiculous. And Instagram became unusable for me for timely promotion once they killed the chronological feed. You hit right on it: people see these social media companies as a product sold to us, but the social media companies see us as the product that they sell to others.
I’m really hoping Substack notes can replace the parts of twitter I enjoy.
The slow death of twitter has been making my world smaller. No longer can I stay up-to-date on social and political discussions in the EU country I moved from (the conversation seems to have transferred to WhatsApp groups).
The other key value was breaking news, whether it’s Ukraine or Finance. That is still working, but I’ve been very suspicious about what topics and convos are being boosted by Elon. Ben Judah I think correctly suggested that all the (twitter blue) VC discussions are increasingly unaligned with the general “elite” conversations and topics.
I’ve also been blocking anyone with twitter blue or simply those who annoy me. That has made things better in the short term, but I am noticing more voices falling silent.
I loved this issue of Read Max. It reminded me of the Cory Doctorow concept of Enshittification of social media - https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ It also made me think about the current state of the AI chatbots vs the current state of Google. The AI chatbots can be amazing for their AI, but they are also pretty nice because they just give a clean clear answer to a question. They are on good behavior, and have not yet developed (or been allowed to display) adversarial (or sociopathic) tendencies. On the other hand, ask Google for the "best restaurant" in any city or town in the world. It responds with a list of paid links to paid lists, following that a bunch of SEO links to paid lists of restaurants. What is does not provide ever is an actual list of objectively reviewed good restaurants. Maybe if you know the name of the legacy news paper in town you can try a search like "top ranked restaurants in x publication" but now we are trying to game Google. Now imagine when ChatGPT is off its best behavior and its results are sold. How much harder will it be to game? I am not especially afraid of AI's honest errors today that result from issues in its development or training, I am real worried about the future when its results are for sale.
My day job is business strategy so I just wanna add that even take the initial sign-up Twitter subscription numbers at face value is only helping Musk's narrative. Since, we don't know the churn rate and if these folks paying now are gonna stay with the platform for a month, much less the years it would take to make this into a sustainable business. And I'd have a small hunch the churn for a product like this could be fairly high when again what exactly is anyone getting out of it.
I paid for LiveJournal for many, many years (probably 2003-2014?) You got more user icons and photo album storage. and once they started doing ads, it allowed you to view LiveJournal ad-free. I think it may have also been a paid feature to allow you to view pages in your own userstyles? unfortunately LJ did start making me wish I was dead at a certain point, which was as much the platform itself as the people I was interacting with. I was on the platform a lot longer than most people were because of communities I was involved in. once those stopped being good, so did everything else.
I don't like that substack is trying to be this all in one platform. It's so off putting it's making me naseaus. It should be focused on tools for writing instead of going toe to toe with Twitter or any social media platform. It's not a wechat. Im repulsed by this miscalculation basically DMM...
I quit Twitter (and FB) many years ago because it was horrible - distracting and irritating and exhausting - long before Musk took control. I think there actually might be something wrong with people who, at this point, stay on it:
I'm also antsy about Substack Notes. Will it be better than Twitter? Uh...probably? But eventually it's still going to replicate the same problems we have with all social media. I don't get why a fine newsletter company would want to become social media.
DMMWIWD makes a lot of sense to me. I've been in numerous bands, ran a record label, and put on a city-wide music fest for three years, and the lengths I had to go to on Facebook just to get to have my ACTUAL FRIENDS see my posts was ridiculous. And Instagram became unusable for me for timely promotion once they killed the chronological feed. You hit right on it: people see these social media companies as a product sold to us, but the social media companies see us as the product that they sell to others.
I’m really hoping Substack notes can replace the parts of twitter I enjoy.
The slow death of twitter has been making my world smaller. No longer can I stay up-to-date on social and political discussions in the EU country I moved from (the conversation seems to have transferred to WhatsApp groups).
The other key value was breaking news, whether it’s Ukraine or Finance. That is still working, but I’ve been very suspicious about what topics and convos are being boosted by Elon. Ben Judah I think correctly suggested that all the (twitter blue) VC discussions are increasingly unaligned with the general “elite” conversations and topics.
I’ve also been blocking anyone with twitter blue or simply those who annoy me. That has made things better in the short term, but I am noticing more voices falling silent.
I loved this issue of Read Max. It reminded me of the Cory Doctorow concept of Enshittification of social media - https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ It also made me think about the current state of the AI chatbots vs the current state of Google. The AI chatbots can be amazing for their AI, but they are also pretty nice because they just give a clean clear answer to a question. They are on good behavior, and have not yet developed (or been allowed to display) adversarial (or sociopathic) tendencies. On the other hand, ask Google for the "best restaurant" in any city or town in the world. It responds with a list of paid links to paid lists, following that a bunch of SEO links to paid lists of restaurants. What is does not provide ever is an actual list of objectively reviewed good restaurants. Maybe if you know the name of the legacy news paper in town you can try a search like "top ranked restaurants in x publication" but now we are trying to game Google. Now imagine when ChatGPT is off its best behavior and its results are sold. How much harder will it be to game? I am not especially afraid of AI's honest errors today that result from issues in its development or training, I am real worried about the future when its results are for sale.
My day job is business strategy so I just wanna add that even take the initial sign-up Twitter subscription numbers at face value is only helping Musk's narrative. Since, we don't know the churn rate and if these folks paying now are gonna stay with the platform for a month, much less the years it would take to make this into a sustainable business. And I'd have a small hunch the churn for a product like this could be fairly high when again what exactly is anyone getting out of it.
I paid for LiveJournal for many, many years (probably 2003-2014?) You got more user icons and photo album storage. and once they started doing ads, it allowed you to view LiveJournal ad-free. I think it may have also been a paid feature to allow you to view pages in your own userstyles? unfortunately LJ did start making me wish I was dead at a certain point, which was as much the platform itself as the people I was interacting with. I was on the platform a lot longer than most people were because of communities I was involved in. once those stopped being good, so did everything else.
I don't like that substack is trying to be this all in one platform. It's so off putting it's making me naseaus. It should be focused on tools for writing instead of going toe to toe with Twitter or any social media platform. It's not a wechat. Im repulsed by this miscalculation basically DMM...
Paying for Twitter would be like paying to receive 3rd class bulk mail.
I quit Twitter (and FB) many years ago because it was horrible - distracting and irritating and exhausting - long before Musk took control. I think there actually might be something wrong with people who, at this point, stay on it:
https://sassone.wordpress.com/2022/11/05/you-should-have-quit-twitter-years-ago/
I'm also antsy about Substack Notes. Will it be better than Twitter? Uh...probably? But eventually it's still going to replicate the same problems we have with all social media. I don't get why a fine newsletter company would want to become social media.
“the shady holding company that now owns Kik, Whisper, imgur, DatPiff, and WorldStarHipHop“
I wish you could elaborate on that, but I’m guessing you wouldn’t be able to - what with the possible threat of legal action and all.
You are such a good writer and so brilliant. Thank you for writing, again and again.