Many argue that something is not right with social media as it currently stands. This post explores what it might mean to make Twitter great again?
Responding to Jack Dorsey’s call for suggestions on how to improve Twitter, Dave Winer put forward two suggestions: preventing trolling and making changes. Some of the particulars Winer shares include giving control over who can reply, eliminate character count and allow organisations to curate lists. Although I agree with Winer about some of these changes, I wonder if the answer to improving Twitter is always to make Twitter great again?
I feel the ways I use Twitter have changed considerably this year. My one word this year has been ‘intent’. A part of this is being more aware of my ‘prosumption’ online. One of my concerns is that Twitter is not the Twitter it once was for me. In short, it feels like there has been an increase in branding, as epitomised by ASCD’s recent spotlight on edu-twitter influencers. There has also been a rise in hostility and abuse. Some of which is automated, some of which perpetuated by crowds.
Although I have not wiped my account and started again, as Anil Dash did, I definitely started reviewing my practice and participation there. To be fair, my participation on Twitter has taken many guises over time. In the past it was the place where I shared ideas and connected the dots. The problem I found was that although I could dive back into my archive, it was far from organised. If this was my ‘outboard brain’ (as it had seemingly become) it had become rather chaotic. Initially, I adjusted things to syndicate to Twitter using Dave Winer’s Radio3 linkblog platform. I then moved to sending from my own site, however this did not feel right.
I wondered why I was actually sharing on Twitter (and every other site, such as Google+ and Tumblr), especially after reading Ben Werdmüller’s reflection on POSSE. Maha Bali suggests that sharing is a reciprocal act:
Giving means bringing something to gift to others … whereas sharing means reciprocity … you bring something of yours to give some to others, but others also bring some of theirs to give you, whether immediate or over time.
If this is so then isn’t it enough to share via my blog and rely on pingbacks and webmentions for reciprocity? As Kicks Condor describes:
I do find that Webmentions are really enhancing linking—by offering a type of bidirectional hyperlink. I think if they could see widespread use, we’d see a Renaissance of blogging on the Web.
Posting on Twitter therefore lacked purpose, contributing to something I did not feel comfortable with. As I have elaborated on in the past:
Often it is presumed that sharing out links and continuing the conversation is always a good thing. However, at some point it can become too much of a good thing. The effort and intention to connect and engage in this situation has the opposite effect.
I also thought that if these links were for me then why not simply post them on my own site, what Greg McVerry describes as a social media of one. Posting on Twitter has now become about sharing if there was actually someone in particular that I felt might be interested and that was my main point on contact.
Some have found Mastodon to be the social answer to Twitter’s ills. This is something Doug Belshaw has written about in the past. However, I have never found a place. In part I agree with Ben Werdmuller, who suggested that:
Mastodon doesn’t suffer from the organizational issues I described above, but by aping commercial social networking services, it suffers from the same design flaws.
Associated with this, I have tried to engage with Micro.Blog, but feel frustrated by the technological constraints. I love the use of RSS, but personally use my headings for too much to give them up and have yet to crack open the code as John Johnston has.
In the song Miss Those Days, Jack Antonoff sings about pining for the past:
I know I was lost, but I miss those days.
I think this conundrum captures the desire to return to what Kicks Condor has described as a weird Twitter. Although I was not tgere for the weirdest of times I remember my early days of anxiety and axiliration, of constant notifications, questions and check-ins. This is epitomised by Craig Kemp’s image of addiction:
Although I never set alarms, there was a time when it encompassed a lot of what I did. I do not regret that time, but it is not necessarily something that I miss. My fast food social media diet has been replaced by one managed around blogs, feeds and comments. I do sometimes feel I miss out on some things, but trust that if I need to know something that I will probably capture through some other means.
What I am left most intrigued by is how my thinking has changed since I started talking with Dr. Ian Guest about this topic. Ironically, I think that his investigation inadvertently spurred my own inquiry. The ever present flanogropher.
NOTE: This post has sat in my drafts brewing for a few months. It involved a range of research. I apologise if it is inconsistent or incoherent, it is a topic that I have been really grappling with. I would love to know if anybody else has any thoughts. As always, comments and webmentions welcome.
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Let’s Make Twitter Great Again? – A Reflection on a Social Media of One by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Hello Aaron,
Terrific post – very timely. I have considered pulling the plug on Twitter, but as you clearly mention, the reciprocity lacking in my blogging experience is often satisfied through Twitter. The key, not lost on me, is thinking of Twitter as a place for interaction (visitor / resident continuum, right?). I don’t want Twitter to be left in the hands of trolls, so I am going to hang in – at least until something better comes along.
Happy Holidays,
Bob
Thanks Bob.
I really like how webmentions allows you to make something more of the recipriocity of places such as Twitter. I’ve never set them up with Blogger, but Greg McVerry has spoken about it.
I also think that you highlight the biggest challenge. I think that it is difficult to pull the plug if there is nothing to fill the void. I am intrigued by things like Change School and other such closed communities. Is that the future? What will it mean for the open web?
Thanks as always for continuing the conversation.
Aaron
https://readwriterespond.com/2018/12/lets-make-twitter-great-again-a-reflection-on-a-social-media-of-one/
Twitter is a difficult topic to think and write about, in part because it’s used differently by so many people. My own Twitter use has reduced to minimal these days, for many reasons, but I do have thoughts.
Inherent in the platform itself is the initial rise in popularity that it needed to hit critical mass, and the resulting rise in popularity of it’s users. This is a one-time thing, and I think when many people talk about “making it great again” they are reminiscing about these initial days when early adopters voices were heard and listened to in a great proportion. Everyone loves to have their voice heard.
Another random thought I have is that people aren’t able to fully operate as a “center among many”, especially those who didn’t grow up in a social media world. What I mean by this is that SM sites like Twitter allow users to create an amazing media ecology that surrounds each user. However users still want control over that ecology, they have strong expectations of their “audience”. Trolls and abusers of the system are one thing (and certainly a worse problem itself), but those who attempt to control the parameters of a conversation, are always going to be longing for a more private, community based space – which Twitter is not.
The post quoted at the top offers some more useful musings about Twitter and its alternatives. It’s always worth it to read honest thoughts on the subject these days.
I use RSS and blog feeds mostly these days as well. One rule of thumb I try to stick by when I do use social media is that whenever I find myself writing the word “we”, I delete it if I can and rewrite my idea using the word “I”. I’m no spokesperson for anyone, and on a platform where everyone is at the center of their own construing, not many people are.
More: A post on Audience-Centrism, which I actually forgot about until writing this post
More: On growth and Twitter
Thank you for your thoughts Glen.
When I read your ‘we’ comment I ran back to the post to check that is not what I had done. However, I recognise that such a sentiment maybe inferred.
I am intrigued to what the future may look like. It is still very hard to argue for a ‘social media of one’ when the silos make it so easy. Also the feeling of being heard is so tempting. Time will tell.
Aaron
Lots of things to chew over and follow up on in this meaty link filled post. I hope to do so over the break.
I think it is one of those topics with a lot of conjecture . Apologies if there are too many links.
Replied to a post by Aaron Davis (Read Write Respond)
Don’t apologize for links. It’s the web and links are important. In fact I might think that you could have a few additional links here! I would have seen it anyway, but I was a tad sad not to have seen a link to that massive pullquote/photo you made at the top of the post which would have sent me a webmention to boot. (Of course WordPress doesn’t make it easy on this front either, so your best bet would have been an invisible
<link>hidden in the text maybe?)I’ve been in the habit of person-tagging people in posts to actively send them webmentions, but I also have worried about the extra “visual clutter” and cognitive load of the traditional presentation of links as mentioned by John. (If he wasn’t distracted by the visual underlines indicating links, he might have been as happy?) As a result, I’m now considering adding some CSS to my site so that some of these webmention links simply look like regular text. This way the notifications will be triggered, but without adding the seeming “cruft” visually or cognitively. Win-win? Thanks for the inspiration!
In your case here, you’ve kindly added enough context about what to expect about the included links that the reader can decide for themselves while still making your point. You should sleep easily on this point and continue linking to your heart’s content.
In some sense, I think that the more links the better. I suspect the broader thesis of Cesar Hidalgo’s book Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies would give you some theoretical back up for the idea.
Syndicated copies to:
Also on:
Apologies Chris for failing to include a mention of the pullquote in the actual text. Just to clarify, I thought Flickr would send a webmention, but maybe I should include the caption at the end of the post like Alan Levine does.
Thank you for the feedback on the links. I recently received some criticism of the amount of links I include.
Bookmarked Let’s Make Twitter Great Again? – A Reflection on a Social Media of One by Aaron Aaron (Read Write Respond) Many argue that something is not right with social media as it currently stands. This post explores what it might mean to make Twitter great again? Responding to Jack Dorsey’s call for suggestions on how to improve Twitter, Dave Winer put forward two suggestions: preventing trolling and making cha…
Lots of things to chew over and follow up on in this meaty link filled post. I hope to do so over the break. Like this:Like Loading…
You have covered quite some ground here Aaron, but what I pulled from it (and feel free to correct me if I misunderstood) are:
• Twitter’s changed and not for the better.
• Your usage of Twitter has changed, perhaps in response to Twitter, but perhaps in an attempt to • better address your evolving needs.
• You’re seeking a satisfactory technical (and ethical?) compromise which still involves Twitter?
I share some of your concerns, but I don’t feel as … unsettled? A couple of hypotheticals I’ll throw into the pot to see what bubbles to the surface.
1. What would happen (for you) if Twitter’s ‘fail whale’ reappeared tomorrow and suddenly Twitter was gone?
2. What if you deactivated your original account and started afresh? Knowing what you know and bearing in mind what you wrote in this post, how would you do things differently, if at all? Is ‘making Twitter great again’ within your capacity?
3. If Twitter is broken beyond repair and neither Mastodon nor micro.blog quite cut it, if you had the wherewithall, what would you design as a replacement? What would it need to have or be able to do?
As 2018 started winding down, I slowly started to clean up and cull my social media presence. I shared much less on Facebook and tried to decide what role that would have in my life. I also have been steadily unfollowing people on my Twitter timeline. Finally, I restarted my Mastodon profile in a different instance to engage again in those spaces.
This is a larger, concerted effort to find value and joy in each of these spaces and practices.
This great post from Aaron Davis describes his thinking about interactions in these spaces…and making them the best that they can be.
Also on:
Dave, although I have concerns about Twitter, I do like the way webmentions brings comments back to my site. I am not sure if this is what you mean by ‘gluing apps together’?
What a rich reflection.
I like (among other things) the idea of tweeting around blogs.
Thank you Bryan. I am really interested in the idea of the ‘comment’. I think that it is easy to say comments have died, however I think this overlooks what constitutes a comment.
For example, how much of the conversations around #ProSocialWeb is incorporated into the various posts written about the subject matter. On the flip-side, I think that Chris Aldrich touched upon something really interesting, what happens if everyone incorporates this information?
Chris, after reading Laura Kalbag’s post, I am wondering if I need to just dive in and go all bridgy.fed and continue my exploration of the social media of one.
Clint, I am enjoying your exploration of Mastodon and what is required. Someone else who has challenged me about both Twitter and Mastodon (and Micro.Blog) has been Ian Guest. He asked that question as to what I wanted out of any of these groups. I think that you touch upon this with your discussion of PLN. One thing that I do not think that I have thought about enough is how a PLN can change and evolve. Some people go, others stay. It is all rather fluid. Although I am willing to discuss all the technicals, maybe this focus on ‘EdTech‘ misses the purpose. Maybe this is Douglas Rushkoff’s point about ‘Team Human‘?
Thank you as always for the provocation.
I too have written about this sense of nostalgia.
Ian Guest, who wrote a PhD on the topic, kindly left me with this response, which I will share with you:
Thankfully there are some people still out there blogging.
Also on:
Ian, moments like this when Twitter tries to fix things on the fly remind me of a comment Ian Guest once made:
So often the aim is to make things as easy and simple as possible, but I find there is something about the friction of carving out responses from my own site. I feel that it certainly makes me more mindful of my digital actions. As Clay Shirky suggests:
Dean, I really appreciate your attempt at balance, even if I do not really like golf. (Can’t agree on everything😜)
This seems like the sort of topic that one might blog about? Here was my attempt:
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/Blogger-Peer-Review/quotebacks@1/quoteback.js
Also on:
Brendan Mackie talks about the idea of parasociality and our desire for relationships
Mackie discusses this all in regards to mediums, such as podcasts or video casts, and the way in which conversations becomes one-way.
There is reference throughout the piece to this being applied to supposed ‘online celebrity friends’? However, the question of what constitutes a ‘celebrity’ in the ‘online’ world to me is sometimes blurred. This is something that John Johnston touches upon.
When I think about some of the podcasts, newsletters and even artists I follow on Bandcamp, so often there is the offer of reciprocity, with suggestions as “We would love a review” or “feel free to leave a comment”. But as one follows these ‘likes’ and ‘subscribes’ we discover that this has more consequence for engagement analytics and algorithms than it does for our relationships with such creators. This adds a different twist to the notion of a ‘social media of one‘ or even comments in general. Putting the problem of spam aside, I wonder if the problem with commenting is that it is actually an ill-conceived promise that nobody actually walked through until they did? Although I can easily comment on social media, I wonder how much it actually carries the conversation or is merely another act of destruction? (As a side note, really not sure where webmentions fits within all of this, that is something I will continue to think about.)
Austin Kleon discusses the challenge associated with answering letters from readers by suggesting that the act of sharing itself should be enough. To expect anything more steals from what matters. I assume that it is for this reason he has no comments on his blog?
Maybe Damian Cowell stoically sums it all up best in an interview with Matt Stewart in which he says:
In part it is for this reason that as I collect these words and join the dots with my monthly newsletter that I do it for me first and fore-mostly, anything else is a bonus.
ᔥ “Doug Belshaw” in Parasocial relationships through digital media – Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel (07/10/2021 10:56:52)