151–160 of 172 posts
The infinite scroll addiction pipeline has segmented the online world largely into two parts: Drooling scroll zombies on twitter/facebook/reddit/etc, and people who don't partake at all. The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother, especially with the death of many popular rss readers.
Only google killed their reader, of course. feedly and inoreader are pretty popular RSS readers.
One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and con…
True, but worse than that: it flattens everything. In another medium, we can kind of tell how much work you put into a thought. A well-written 500 word post is a different animal than a throwaway line. This isn't a good thing. Who's an expert vs an amateur just having fun? Who's just musing idly while sipping scotch versus gone through several drafts and really put a lot of work into this? Who's passionate, if wrong,…
I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).
> Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. And then have 0 people read your blog because it’s on your random domain. Maybe your strategy works for well known bloggers, but tweeting content that people actually read beats owning content that nobody reads. And it is much harder to get people to visit your self-hosted blog than it is to get them to read your tweets.
I appreciate it's some tiny fraction of what's out there, but if you want to do it you can do it, you just probably have to recognise that it's not content alone that's going to be important.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I happen to agree with you a lot. Unfortunately I think what people will take away from this article is: How can we fix twitter. The answer isn't to fix it. It's the wrong use of the medium. The bigger problem is how can we network indepdent blogs in a federated fashion where it's easier to have responses, build audiences, etc. i.e. You can't exactly respond very easily and see the 10k view with a single blog article…
Maybe we need to bring back web rings
One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and con…
Twitter's competitor Weibo launched a feature called "Long Weibo" years ago. It's essentially a blog service, except that Weibo would display the first 140 characters of a long post as if it is a tweet, and a reader needs to click on an icon to expand the tweet into a full article. It's a really nice feature. Clean time line as before, users who hate changes won't get bothered, but those who crave for longer writings…
I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).
> If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Not entirely true. You can generate nicely formatted content using a centralized service, and then self-host the files it outputs. E.g. we support this with FWD:Everyone, folks are free to use our tool to format any email thread for publication on the web, and then self-host published threads elsewhere by just saving our API responses. IMHO this is a much…
I use https://brid.gy/ to syndicate posts from my own website (https://www.jvt.me/mf2/2020/04/svn4c/) to Twitter (https://twitter.com/JamieTanna/status/1254670009420431360) so I'm still owning my content, but I can still interact with folks on other platforms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also deeply miss the times when people had their "sites", which had more personality/memorability than a twitter/instagram feed. Maybe the time for "personal web spaces" is past and the web will remain " short form content scattered around other people's platforms", or maybe those platforms are popular just because of the network effect? I've been toying with ideas to bring "social" aspects into sites, as I think t…
See https://www.jvt.me for some really interesting examples of what can be done on the indieweb now. (I found that site because he shared a link to a post I wrote.) Edit: an earlier version of this post said I found it in the referrers log. It seems I was wrong.
If anyone is interested learning more about the IndieWeb, https://www.jvt.me/posts/2019/10/20/indieweb-talk/ is a transcript of a conference talk I gave on what the IndieWeb is
Bring back Technorati, circa 2004. I miss it very much. Decentralized blogs need some centralized point to keep track of conversations. Pingbacks didn't work because they lacked verification and therefore were immediately overrun with spam. Technorati offered validity. If I wrote something good and there were 500 pingbacks, and 490 of them were spam, Technorati made visible the 10 good ones, and let me see the reputa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What interesting controversial content are they banning specifically? They ban interesting content all the time - a very recent example is they banned the AYTU Bioscience page where they talk about an experimental covid treatment. YouTube censored their videos as well.
I think they have an understandable reason for that (too much harmful misinformation about covid going around, they don't have enough eyes to sort it out, and at their scale it's probably net harm reduction to put a simple wordfilter on it for now), but I'm a lot more sympathetic to arguments along these lines in particular. I could believe that moderation is more effective on smaller userbase-scales because it reduc…
Also the Aytu ban was pushed by a NYTimes writer and twitter often bends their rules to that. Aytu bioscience is a publicly traded company with deals with one of the largest hospitals on tech they have been working on since 2016. They even have a SEC filing from this week of their deal on the tech which twitter and YouTube both banned because a nytimes reporter complained (bias against the president).
One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and con…
Twitter's competitor Weibo launched a feature called "Long Weibo" years ago. It's essentially a blog service, except that Weibo would display the first 140 characters of a long post as if it is a tweet, and a reader needs to click on an icon to expand the tweet into a full article. It's a really nice feature. Clean time line as before, users who hate changes won't get bothered, but those who crave for longer writings…