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The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

coryzue.com

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Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#291

Post by watwut »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #216
bnralt wrote: post #68

One thing I’ve noticed is that the culture on Twitter now is quite different than it was a decade ago, and the platform has calcified. A decade ago the common adivce for how to connect with people - Tweet often, comment often, follow accounts - connected you with a lot of people, and you would often end up following each other. I started a new account recently (hadn’t used my old one in years), and doing so now got m…

The comment quality standards required for people to reply and/or follow you are higher now. Tweeting often is useless if you have nothing really substantial to say. There are millions of accounts that do that, and they’re mostly noise disguised as signal, but most of the Twitter community has caught on and now auto-filters it out. You’ve gotta get through that auto-filter now with information or insights of substanc…

> comment quality standards required for people to reply and/or follow you are higher now

I really do not find this to be true. The high ones are from blue checks and overwhelming majority of them has no meaning. I do not even mean insulting or something I disagree with, they just don't say anything.

There are very few real responses now and majority of what I see excluding the above are knee jerks super short responses.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#292

Post by jrmg »

My opinion, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, is that Twitter changing its prompt, in 2009, from the ‘small’ “What are you doing?” to the ‘big’ “What’s happening?” sowed the seeds of its change from the authentic and personal thing it was, to the katamari of sound and fury it is now.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#293

Post by ceejayoz »

passion__desire wrote: post #225
ceejayoz wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Community Notes corrects for atleast factual claims right away. No, it doesn't. It's vote-based; enough people have to vote that it's a helpful vote for it to appear. That can take hours/days/weeks.

It's not opinion or votes all the way down. The corrections have to be referenced. So if someone is misrepresenting a fact, it will be community noted and votes will accumulate as all that remains to do is verify the referenced source.

> It's not opinion or votes all the way down.

It really is. An unreferenced note may be voted up; a well-referenced one may not. There's certainly no requirement you even click the references to see if they say what's claimed. A misrepresented fact may be noted, and it's certainly not synchronous.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#294

Post by czue »

jpalawaga wrote: post #76

PJ Vogt (formerly Reply All) recently did an interesting episode on his new podcast about this exact topic[0]. It's worth a listen. It really helped to clarify some meta-thoughts about how attention works, how media consumption influences us, and how I think about Twitter (and people's relation to it). Like, at one point, PJ talks about how he's witnessed people at the bar talking to a friend (purportedly), but in a…

I almost quoted this episode in the post! But I couldn't be bothered to go back and find the clip I wanted to use...

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#295

Post by robertlagrant »

jihiggins wrote: post #240
robertlagrant wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Real culture is hard, not reproducible, not predictable, and initially unprofitable. So it is not valued by capitalism. It happens despite the economy, not because of it. Capitalism is just people making agreements with each other in a legal framework. It 100% does not preclude charitable work, volunteerism, or art. It also doesn't value anything; it's a system where, as much as possible, people can do what they wa…

i would argue that capitalism implicitly values... capital? just as socialism values... society also, you're conflating markets with capitalism

Come on. Arguing from names is really silly.

I'd say almost everything but capitalism values authoritarianism. E.g. socialism in the end by "society" means "the state".

Society in capitalism is generally separate to markets, e.g. your local community, or charirites, or churches, or sport, or schools. Not bureaucrats taking your effort and doling it out (or not) as they see fit.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#296

Post by I_Am_Nous »

commieneko wrote: post #88

"Authenticity in an Attention Economy" Is that anything like Authenticity in an Advertising Economy? I have to admit, I've never really understood (or used) Twitter/X. Short form posts lacking depth but very, very timely? The only time I used it very much was early on when I was living in Boston and it was useful to find out if there were subway outages. Lacking depth, timely, but pointedly useful. Somehow that funct…

In my experiences with Twitter, if you can find a group of some sort that you interact with a lot, Twitter would try to keep that group of people interacting with each other in some way. So part of Twitter is just "being part of a group" and is usually used as entertainment or self-promotion.

If you are just there for the drama, you'll love it. There's always drama. If you are just there to interact with other music producers, there are enough of them that there's usually something new worth listening to or discuss. If you just want dumb memes, there are also plenty of them.

But very few people are going onto Twitter to "be themselves" in the first place, so looking for true human interaction is a lonely time on Twitter.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#297

Post by gorwell »

Ensorceled wrote: post #186
bachmeier wrote: post #21

> Elon’s political antics chased away a lot of good people. Many of my favorite follows have moved to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. Also, more and more people are waking up and realizing that social media is actually quite bad for you, and leaving it behind. Good for them. Bad for me. It's common to blame the move from Twitter on Elon's politics. And that's perfectly valid. I moved away for a much simpler reason. H…

> It's common to blame the move from Twitter on Elon's politics. And that's perfectly valid. I moved away for a much simpler reason. The bulk of the people I follow (mostly authors, journalists, and geeks) have moved off or drastically reduced their activity on Twitter and it's almost entirely due to Elon's politics and the changes he's making in support of that world view.

To be fair, that's because he leveled the playing field that was tilted in favor of the elite establishment consensus. They aren't supportive of a platform with free speech. ie, speech one disagrees with. Team Establishment was happy when it censored opposing viewpoints and it's no surprise, although unfortunate, they migrated to regressive platforms where that still occurs.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#298

Post by swagempire »

jrmg wrote: post #292

My opinion, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, is that Twitter changing its prompt, in 2009, from the ‘small’ “What are you doing?” to the ‘big’ “What’s happening?” sowed the seeds of its change from the authentic and personal thing it was, to the katamari of sound and fury it is now.

Actually this comment is totally underrated :)

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#300

Post by zer8k »

kortex wrote: post #282
zer8k wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we even see authenticity in public? If you have the ability to sense another human's emotions you can often tell when someone is being authentic or not. Set and setting are also important. Authenticity is closer to honesty about yourself rather than some kind of self-expression. I am still authentic if I don't mention my hobby of collecting records while I am at the gym. I am not authentic if I start making up w…

Great points. I think fundamentally you and I have different operating definitions of authenticity. Though I do want to clarify > The systemization of everything (through what you call "radical self-expression") is creating a bunch of pseudo-intellectual naval gazing That's not my term, it's a burner term, and has nothing to do with systematization. The Ten Principles are a set of descriptive (not proscriptive) obser…

> Tl;dr - "masking" making defining "authenticity" challenging for neurodivergent folks.

Understood

> But I don't think having a fixed concept of self is a universal experience. For me, (when I'm at my full potential) I'm able to select and deselect attributes of myself to express.

I don't think anyone has a true "self". I am not who I was 10 years ago and neither are you. Physically, sure. Mentally? Metaphysically? Absolutely not. People you interact with aren't stagnant by definition. If they were, you wouldn't be interacting with them. Where the honesty (and the authenticity) comes into play is where who you are now is who you are representing.

As for selecting and deselecting traits I don't think this is inauthentic. It's normal, actually, in that people do this to create connections. I like to think of it like a handshake. We each kind of discuss things we like, we eventually arrive in some consistent state, and now we're "connected". We are still authentic (in that we are still honest) but we have selected certain traits of ours that are similar enough to foster a relationship. Of course, the inauthentic person can exploit this by just replaying back what they hear. This usually doesn't last long though. Someone too similar also raises red flags. An authentic person, IMO, will present with things you like and things you don't like. The balance of that is what makes the relationship between the two. Admitting what appear to be a negative (I don't like X, I think X) is actually a good indicator of an honest person.

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