The follow lie, and why it's worse than ever
12challenges.substack.com
The follow lie, and why it's worse than ever
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Re: The follow lie, and why it's worse than ever
#2[flagged]
Re: The follow lie, and why it's worse than ever
#3All true. 25 or 30 years ago I would manually visit specific people’s web sites to see what new stuff they posted. That was not as inconvenient as you might think. The density of information I wanted on the 100 or so sites I had bookmarked was higher than now by far. Blogs used to handle notifications well.
Now, I basically depend on X and even on Facebook to shout out when I have a new book or open source project I want people to check out. This is far from perfect, but requires little of my time. For me to keep producing reading and code content, I feel like I need about 1000 to 2000 ‘true fans’ and I think I have that so I am happy.
For most young people starting to build a web presense, I think it must be much more difficult to get started. Still, I notice some young people creating amazing open source projects and they can create a living pretty quickly. I enjoy reading code as much as the words people write.
Re: The follow lie, and why it's worse than ever
#4There is a comic by The Oatmeal about this https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people_2021 It came up when Facebook convinced news organizations to "pivot to video" then throttled their traffic.
Re: The follow lie, and why it's worse than ever
#5The follow button works on Mastodon. But let's stay on FB or Twitter, and beg for e-mail addresses!
Re: The follow lie, and why it's worse than ever
#6A related concept is the attention economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy Commercial sites have an incentive to promise to provide more attention than they can actually deliver, leading to a bubble.
Re: The follow lie, and why it's worse than ever
#7You can view TikTok’s that are just from your followed accounts quite easily. However, they’re not nearly as high quality because TikTok is pretty good at guessing which videos are better than others per audience.
I think what Facebook did took it way too far when they started promoting meme content over pictures of your friends and their experiences. It really ruined the site. But TikTok seems to have done it right where you can ignore the algorithm if you choose.
Re: The follow lie, and why it's worse than ever
#8My rule for feeds: if it's not reverse chronological, I won't use it.
Re: The follow lie, and why it's worse than ever
#9I suspect the follow button exists primarily to train the advertising algorithm -- how much more would you pay to show a political ad to someone who "followed" Nikki Haley or show your Honda Civic aftermarket parts to someone who "follows" Honda vs just a demographic match.
Re: The follow lie, and why it's worse than ever
#10So... the recommendation system works like it's supposed to? Giving you content you want to see.
I'm not sure what the complaint is here, besides that platforms strong arm their creators into creating more engaging content to retain their viewers. Everyone's taste shifts from time to time, so I think it's reasonable to expect platforms to show you what content you're likely in the mood for watching at the moment.
It's the opposite that bugs me: Platforms forcing me to go out of my way to discover interesting content once my taste shifts. At that point, I'd wonder why I even use that platform if not for content curated based on my personal preferences. Might as well go back to RSS newsreaders for the self-curated experience.