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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36180 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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So it looks like Elon Musk officially owns all of Twitter now, and he's already fired the CEO, CFO, and policy chief. I don't have any strong opinions on this, but does anyone want to stake some predictions?

Musk presents himself as a free speech absolutist, which is encouraging to me, but I'd be concerned about the conflict of interest. I anticipate there will be some accusations of throttling unfavorable opinions about either him or his companies (RIP rogue driverless Tesla videos). I think the tension between unrestricted speech and a quality user experience will continue to be a problem, as I can't identify an obvious solution. Blue checkmarks are making hilariously cataclysmic remarks but I predict Twitter will remain a favored haven for the journalist class.

In the fight between network effects and identity politics, I think identity politics will win the long term victories. We've all seen what happens when "Twitter, but for conservatives" services get launched. When will we see the first "Twitter, but for SJWs" go live? And will that work out any better for them?

I would not predict Twitter's immediate demise, but I did not really anticipate Facebook's abrupt demise. I've used Facebook for years without much complaint, but in the last year or two they've declared war on my adblockers and serve me 10 ads for every status update I see from people I actually care about. This means I no longer routinely use Facebook or any of their products, even though I've been a piece of their captured audience for more than 15 years.

My students report almost no Facebook use, outside of Instagram, and when I ask them about social media they usually say TikTok or YouTube (the latter of which I do not think of as social media at all). Many also use Discord but for some reason don't seem to think of Discord as "social media." If it was publicly traded, I'd probably buy stock in Discord as the next Facebook-like center of online activity. Most of my students have heard of Twitter, and absolutely never use it.

Twitter won't collapse overnight, and I think Musk has better business intuitions than Zuckerberg, but I think history is against him. At some point enough people will quit that the network effects will collapse. The question is whether Musk can spin the company into something more sustainable before that happens.

This means I no longer routinely use Facebook or any of their products, even though I've been a piece of their captured audience for more than 15 years.

Yeah this is really weird to me. I quite enjoyed facebook for many years, as it was the only reasonable way I could keep track of people I knew above my Dunbar limit. It was genuinely quite pleasant to get a drip-trickle of new information about people I knew, like oh neat they went to Spain, oh dang that's some insane workplace drama, oh wow they have triplets! And EVERYONE used it, so it worked almost perfectly as an address book of sorts.

The downside for me started maybe about 5 years ago, where instead of seeing my friends' status updates, I was increasingly bombarded with seeing their 'likes' on thoroughly shitty meme pages. It just felt so depersonal all of a sudden. I had to duct tape a variety of browser extensions to get it anywhere near usable but it just got worse. The vibe felt off, maybe it was just the culture war but people felt increasingly nasty and hostile, just shoving outrageous clickbait into everyone's face and saying "LOOK AT THIS SHIT". I truly hated it.

Nowadays it's desperately trying to claw onto attention by pretending it's TikTok, so I just get inundated with videos about pugs acting silly. I keep it around as an archive I guess, and it's still useful as very limited address book. But besides that, it's more or less useless.

Which brings me to the biggest loss of all: events. Oh my god, events. This was the best feature by far. Because everyone had a facebook account, the default assumption was that you will create a page on facebook for all your parties. And jesus fucking christ it cannot be understated how amazing of a feature it was that you could see who was going!!! I admit it, if I was on the fence about a party, I'd trawl through the 'attending' tab to see if any hotties were going. Facebook also let me know what their favorite bands were. I'd show up to the party already equipped with a solid opener.

Those were the days, and there's no comparable replacement for events. RIP.

Is it really that bad a business model? Discord's paid options mainly offer cosmetic things with a side of what I'm going to call "premium infrastructure access" (i.e. I think you get better bitrates in voice calls and such). People seem to be fine paying for purely-cosmetic digital things, and premium infrastructure access is something a lot of services offer. Is it more that those things are not enough to sustain it?

Twitter for SJWs already exists in the default mastodon, uh, servers? Instances? I don't know the lingo. It became a thing back when they were furious that Twitter didn't have enough censorship.

Of course now it's just tiny isolated islands of "LGBTQ+ antifa hacker" servers that all block each other over not blocking the right fascists. Pixiv's Pawoo and Baraag, which I think are by far the largest, are totally isolated from the wokiesphere. Plus I think there's still some GNU Free Speech guys lurking out in the wastes like shitposting Fremen.

Twitter for SJWs already exists in the default mastodon, uh, servers? Instances? I don't know the lingo. It became a thing back when they were furious that Twitter didn't have enough censorship.

Mastodon WTF Timeline is a pretty interesting description

And Twitter allied itself with the Blue side in the war, making the Red side progressively more and more unwelcome on the system. Some of this alliance was expressed overtly, for instance by creating an "advisory board" to guide Twitter culture and staffing it with some of the most hateful of Blue leaders. Other actions were done covertly, such as by "shadowbanning" persons identified as Red by AI systems to prevent them from being able to communicate with each other through Twitter while maintaining plausible deniability that the system was taking a side. This stuff created a steady stream of Red refugees who still wanted to use a system like Twitter but didn't want to or could not use Twitter in particular. But there were also many on the Blue side angry that the Red side still had not been completely annihilated and they considered themselves refugees from a space rendered unsafe by the ongoing presence of the Red side. Both kinds of people wanted to go somewhere other than Twitter.

Around March 2017 I started hearing about Mastodon in a significant way from my contacts on Twitter, who I'd like to emphasize include both Red and Blue (making me unusual among Twitter users) as well as a lot of Japanese people who are outside that classification. There also started to be media coverage of Mastodon at this time. The coverage, all from Blue-aligned media, largely presented Mastodon as a cool new alternative to Twitter that would be free of "harassment," which is a Blue code word for the mere existence of the Red side.

At that time I thought I could see the train wreck coming, because I knew enough to know that the Red side was already strongly entrenched in the pre-Mastodon GNU Social network, and I thought I foresaw that as Blue users showed up thinking they owned the place, the federation would dissolve into fighting the same war that had devastated English-language Twitter, and so it would never be a successful Twitter replacement. I was wrong about this; what actually turned out to be the big divisive issue was something much more entertaining.

Circa Friday the 14th: English-speaking users, especially on mastodon.social, start becoming horrified by what is varyingly described as a flood of Japanese-language postings; an organized invasion by Japanese Internet trolls; a flood of "anime" (significant because "anime avatars" used by white people had been considered an emblem of the Red side in the Twitter Culture War); and a flood of "child pornography." Thoughtful discussion and unhinged hysteria ensue, simultaneously. The fact of Twitter's having been huge in Japan was not generally known in the English-speaking world at the time, which helps support the sheer incomprehension of where all these people could possibly have come from. There's speculation that maybe Mastodon had received some kind of mainstream media coverage that attracted a lot of Japanese attention, or had attracted attention on some popular Japanese Web site other than Twitter, though neither appears to have really been the case - such coverage happened later, as an effect, not a cause, of the sudden influx of Japanese users.

On the night of Friday the 14th: Pixiv (presumably a small group of their employees tasked to do this as an experiment) creates a Mastodon instance (pawoo.net) and it immediately starts growing on roughly the same curve as mstdn.jp. Early on the morning of the 15th, it passes mastodon.xyz to become the third most populous instance on the entire network. Much traffic on and from this instance consists of the amateur artists who populate Pixiv itself sharing their artwork especially including that which they're not allowed to post on Twitter, namely ロリコン.

Midnight, start of Saturday the 15th: mastodon.xyz announces that it is blocking pawoo.net (i.e. refusing to exchange message traffic) "due to a lot of pedopornographic accounts there, without any action from the administrator." The unbelievable idea that ロリコン is really acceptable to Pixiv and Japan generally, and is not a form of extreme misbehaviour by a fringe of trolls, has not sunk in on the English-language side.

Saturday the 15th, afternoon: Gargron the Mastodon developer and admin of mastodon.social creates a Github issue to discuss technological aspects of the ロリコン issue, mostly focused on the potential legal exposure for server admins whose servers may end up caching, and thus "possessing," material that is illegal to possess in their local jurisdiction. In postings there and on the Mastodon network, both in English and Japanese, the administrators of pawoo.net declare that they will not ban from their own servers material that is legal in Japan, but they will attempt to enforce a rule that "mature images" must be hidden by NSFW tags, and they will cooperate with other technical workers in attempts to keep "mature images" out of caches where they might create liability for third parties.

I think that the word choice of the Pixiv admins calling this stuff "mature images" in their English-language communications is telling: Japanese people think what the English speakers are freaking out over is the possibility that children might see the images. They're "mature" images that ought to be for consenting adults only, is the objection to ロリコン that comes closest to making any kind of sense from a Japanese point of view. The idea that even consenting adults ought not to be allowed to see such images isn't on the Japanese radar, and would seem to be wacky moonbat nonsense, even though it is so obvious, and so obviously sensible, as to be unspoken on the English side.

My assessment is supported by the Japanese-language side of the ongoing discussion on the network itself, where Japanese people frequently suggest (English-language commentary) that the network needs "age verification" and that that will somehow solve the problem. At this point I make it something of my own mission to inform the Japanese that that's not the English-speaking point of view, and verifying the age of users will not solve any relevant aspect of the problem that the English speakers see; while similarly informing the non-Japanese of how the Japanese do see things. I don't know if I make much headway in this effort.

Pixiv's Pawoo and Baraag, which I think are by far the largest, are totally isolated from the wokiesphere.

The reasons for which being absolutely hilarious given the groomer thread.

His affected squeamishness is hysterical, isn't it? Almost as much as Matt Skala absolutely failing to hide his power level in the linked post lol.

I was referring to watching the drama unfold between people arguing democrats/leftists/"the woke" are groomers and people who identify with those labels taking offense to the label while thinking to myself how ridiculous the arguments of both sides are given how "the wokiesphere" responded in that case. Or how Reddit responded to similar concerns. Or how Facebook did.

EDIT: Grammar.

Is there some reason why you think he's not actually squeamish? I'm not familiar with him as a writer.

We've all seen what happens when "Twitter, but for conservatives" services get launched. When will we see the first "Twitter, but for SJWs" go live? And will that work out any better for them?

Oh yes, very much so. Or at least, if they fail it won't be for the same reasons. While officially Parler was killed because of hate speech and such, my impression was that was just a pretense. It seemed pretty clear to me that actually, Parler was killed because it was offensive to the woke ideology which dominates big tech companies. Whereas "Twitter for SJWs" wouldn't be offensive ideologically, so if it fails it will be because it couldn't get a user base (unlike Parler, which imo was smothered as an act of censorship).

Parler was in long-standing violation of Amazon's rules regarding moderation (something like 6 weeks before getting kicked off after the Jan 6th riot), but it's also worth noting that there was possible (probable?) political pressure on the tech giants to ban it when people started paying more attention, which does support your point that ideology played a big hand in deciding Parler's fate.

I think that with layoffs coming there is a message of depolitization coming in the FAANG...

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This is my experience exactly. I hated the shit out of the suggested posts side hustle, just show me my cousin's baby photos goddamn it

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"Twitter, but for SJWs" go live? And will that work out any better for them?

No. Normies are the lifeblood of social media, and any ideologically inflected alternative is going to suffer from the fact that normies aren't going to be interested in switching platforms to hang out with a bunch of fanatical weirdos. Being slightly more reputable that right-wing conspiracy theorists is not enough.

Many also use Discord but for some reason don't seem to think of Discord as "social media."

Most people are operating off a vibes-based rather than rigorous definition of social media. "Social media" means the big, talked about platforms - Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc... Not private forums, the comments section of a news site, or a blog.

I'd argue that some people probably think that an outward facing surface is part of what makes traditional social media, the idea that you can tweet out to whoever the retweets take you to or that you can be looked up by randos on facebook. Discord kinda doesn't have that, its all invite based, its mostly not used to send 1 message to a large audience, and you can't really look someone up unless you know their discord ID.

It's still social media in the broad sense but its more like myspaceified IRC than chatroomified twitter.

Another interpretation might be that Social Media is a place where individuals share, consume, and create viral content. YouTube/Twitch are becoming more like legacy media and Discord is more a communication tool.

"Twitter but for X" services die for a simple reason; you can't really start a new social media just as a clone of an existing one but for a certain limited audience, there's just not enough "there" there for that to work. Social medias simply die when there's enough social medias with new, more interesting and more fluent (one might say: more addictive) mechanics to take their place and the potential new users start using them. Myspace didn't die because someone established a MySpace but for Bush supporters or whatever, it died because new, more interesting social medias with different mechanics took their place.

Switter (twitter for sex workers) seemed to be going strong before legal issues made continued operation dicey.

"Twitter but for X" services die for a simple reason

That's a false premise. They don't tend to die, they're active but less popular.

I would not predict Twitter's immediate demise, but I did not really anticipate Facebook's abrupt demise. I've used Facebook for years without much complaint, but in the last year or two they've declared war on my adblockers and serve me 10 ads for every status update I see from people I actually care about. This means I no longer routinely use Facebook or any of their products, even though I've been a piece of their captured audience for more than 15 years.

Demise? It still has 2 billion users, plus 2 billion Instagram, plus 2 billion for What's App, although there is a lot of overlap between these.

Twitter won't collapse overnight, and I think Musk has better business intuitions than Zuckerberg, but I think history is against him. At some point enough people will quit that the network effects will collapse. The question is whether Musk can spin the company into something more sustainable before that happens.

I think the opposite will happen. Twitter will gain popularity as a free speech friendlier alternative to other platforms, and also increased engagement under Musk.

When will we see the first "Twitter, but for SJWs" go live?

Already exists.

Also Tumblr

Also Mastodon.

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