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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31256 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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The Beautiful People are in Charge Just Like Everywhere Else.

I don't have anything terribly insightful to say about any of this. It's just another entry in the ongoing process of what I've mentally termed internet gentrification or nerd cultural appropriation. I attempt not to get bent out of shape over these things, lest I tip over into the "ugh, normies..." nerd-hipster trope but this article resonated with me. I miss the pre-Dice CmdrTaco-era of Slashdot (fuck Beta!). I hate influencer culture and every YouTube video telling me to "like and subscribe". There used to be a commenter on SSC whose entire schtick was something like "Everything is a popularity contest and all is lost" and he's starting to make sense to me. Moloch will have his sacrifices.

Making video the primary form of communication has ruined the internet.

Longreads and effort-writing is not dead yet, but I do hate when people assume I want to watch video of them essentially reading a text. Unless there's content that is not representable in a textual form, I don't want to see your video.

Podcasts are fine, OTOH, I can listen to them while driving or mowing the lawn or doing some other stuff that leaves higher brain functions free.

Twitter is an obvious exception to this. Same for Substack, Reddit, Facebook, and blogs. It's not that video has taken over the internet , but video has consumed the attention of those who are receptive to it.

TikTok is poised to overtake Twitter as the main wellspring of culture. Facebook and Reddit both let you post videos. Substack, tumblr, and other blogs are an increasingly irrelevant fraction.

In order for TikTok to "overtake Twitter as the main wellspring of culture". Twitter would first have to be the main wellspring of culture, which I find difficult to believe. While Intellectually I recognize they must exist, I don't know if I've ever actually met a real live human being that uses it regularly.

You definitely have, see the mau chart.

I don't believe that chart proves as much as you think it does. If we assume for the sake of argument that every single one of those 70 million north American accounts corresponds to a real live flesh and blood person. IE that the number of bots, corporate PR accounts, and users operating multiple accounts on Twitter is 0. That works out to a little under 1 in 5 people, or around 18% of the combined population of the US and Canada. In contrast creationists are estimated to be around 30% of the population. How many creationists do you know?

Of course thing is that while the number of bots on Twitter is in dispute, we know for a fact that that a substantial portion of Twitter accounts are official corporate PR, and that a lot of people have multiple accounts so that estimate of 1 in 5 people or 18% of the population is almost certainly overgenerous.

I was specifically rebutting the " I don't know if I've ever actually met a real live human being that uses it regularly." claim. Obviously a MAU chart proves nothing about 'wellspring of culture', as the creationist example, or something like 'red tribe', 'christians', 'reality tv fans', 'old people' - all of which have large populations yet aren't culturally dominant - nicely shows.

and I'm pointing out that it's not much of a rebuttal, for instance that 18% of the population (if we're feeling overgenerous) might be concentrated in a specific geographic area. Likewise "cultural dominance" is a difficult measure. IE Gamergate is really big deal amongst a certain subset of the extremely online left, and has been characterized by a number of different users here as "the most culturally significant event of the last two decades" but I'd be surprised if more than 10% of the general population knew or cared anything about it. Publishers sleeping with and/or buying off reviewers oh you sweet summer child this has been the norm since the 19th century.

I suspect lotsa lotsa botsa there. No way almost every fourth American (excluding kids too young to know what Twitter is) is an active twitter user.

"MAU" is an industry term that means something like 'people who have used the service in some way in the past month', like, if you have an account and went to twitter.com at some point. It doesn't mean 'number of people who have a twitter account and actively post'.

From twitter's most recent financial report

We define mDAU as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given daythrough twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions. Average mDAU for a period represents thenumber of mDAU on each day of such period divided by the number of days for such period.

(mDAU is monetizable daily active user, not monthly active user - "In Q2 2019, Twitter discontinued publishing MAU figures in favor of figures regarding monetizable daily active users (mDAU)")

Worldwide - "Average monetizable daily active usage (mDAU) was 217 million for the three months ended December 31, 2021, an increase of 13% year over year.". In the US - ". In the three months endedDecember 31, 2021, we had 38 million average mDAU in the United States".

For the monthly active user number - afaict, all that requires is 1) have a twitter account and 2) be at 'twitter.com' sometime in the past month. It makes sense that 1/4 of americans do that.

Oddly, this means I'm not counted as a mDAU, despite spending at least an hour on twitter.com today. And most of that was w/o adblock.

Anyway even if for the sake of argument it's 1/4 that, that's still 1/16th of all americans, meaning HIynka has interacted with many of them

I don't think most of those are bots.

We define mDAU as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given daythrough twitter.com,

That includes every bot that logs in at least once a day, and pro-rated count of every bot that logs in less frequently.

  1. have a twitter account and 2) be at 'twitter.com' sometime in the past month

Once per month would only give 1/30: "number of mDAU on each day of such period divided by the number of days". If you go once a months, that's 1/30 on average mDAU. And no, even that doesn't make any sense for 1/4 of Americans. 1/4 of people living in a posh neighborhood of San Francisco, maybe, but that's not everybody in America.

I do not see any mention of the filtering of the data to exclude bots, and I imagine they have zero incentive to do this - most casual readers would assume it's "number of people using Twitter", and for the litigious types there is actual definition that covers their asses. I think this number however is grossly inflated and actual people constitute maybe 1/10, maybe even 1/100 of that number. Maybe even less, who knows.

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Since when was Twitter a wellspring of culture at all, let alone the main one? Twitter is 90% people saying stupid shit and getting into Internet drama.

That's not at all incompatible though. The other 10% could be influential, and that's what you'd expect - 90% of everything is shit, elite theory, whatever

Internet drama that we all subsequently talk about and/or elect president.

I think that a lot of the people who live and breathe internet drama forget just how niche it is.

Twitter is an obvious exception to this.

No it really is not. Twitter is, if anything, patient zero.

I think centralization also ruined the internet (to go back to the days of forums where we didn't have constant culture wars over who controlled the four or five social media sites...).

What a coincidence: video probably requires the most centralization and capital.

The centralization trend was already present, hell Usenet was a central forum before people used the term forum (compared to contemporary BBSs.)

Not exactly: copyright compliant video does. Bittorrent was wiping the floor with mainstream services for a long time. Now they're about on par.

Even putting aside ease of use (I know people here will object but some people really don't want to do the minimum and would just rather use Youtube/Netflix/whoever) there are forms of media that aren't best suited to Bittorrent.

For example: obscure stuff was often a problem due to the need for seeders. I imagine a lot of stuff (e.g. low-view, long runtime streams) would also have issues lasting.

I dunno, I'm still happily using it, and obscure media are a lot easier to find there.

Yeah I was going to say torrenting is my first choice for obscure shit these days. You might not get it immediately due to seeding, but at least it's there.

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