Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things, or, How We Got Here

December 22, 2022 8:04 PM

Novelist and "cuspy Oregon Trail Xennial" Catherynne M. Valente (previously) takes us through Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media.
posted by Etrigan (33 comments total)

It's a little ironic to read this on Substack, since that seems doomed to fall into the same trap of profit motive and exploitation, but I guess it make senses to use the tool at hand to get the word out, even though you know that the tool is flawed.

It is very affirming to talk about this on Metafilter, with all of its struggles, because it gives a bit of hope that another model is possible: that we can band together and talk to each other and buy less.

Here's to making little things!
posted by aneel at 9:39 PM on December 22, 2022 [15 favorites]

I remember LJ days, and Valente is right that people always find their way to building another community. But every time you changeover you lose people.

It's like the transit engineers say: for every transfer you lose 30% of the commuters.

I have good friends from LJ who never made the leap to DW or Twitter; and good friends from Twitter who will never make it to Mastodon.

It is a loss, and we should recognize that.
posted by suelac at 10:07 PM on December 22, 2022 [22 favorites]

I'm one of those people who wrote literally millions of words on LiveJournal, and all I'll say is, every time there's another Great Social Migration, not everyone comes along. Sometimes you just realize you're done building sand castles for bullies to kick over. You've got kids now, or a big job, or an illness that takes a lot of your energy, or an expensive and time-consuming hobby, and your community-building days just aren't happening anymore.

I loved this call to action. So sweet, so idealistic. But it really just made me feel tired. I walked away from LiveJournal with a couple friends I still talk to. But it was just a colossal time sink for me, for so long. I never built an audience. Never got a job from it. If anything it hurt me, in a few ways. It was fun at the time but in the end I built jack shit that will last. And that's going to be how a lot of people view Twitter too. Not everyone is building these loving communities. A lot of people are just shitposting and blowing off steam. Twitter has been a liability for lots of people. An anchor that sinks careers at random. But that "here we all are in this land of bad ideas" vibe gave the place a lot of its wild energy. Building that from scratch may not happen again. Something else will take its place. Maybe someday that thing will be better. But a lot of people aren't up to do that work again, and who can blame them?

At least on metafilter it feels like the green is something that's probably of some use to someone. It's why I'm still here. Hopefully Jessamyn isn't planning to sell the site to the Russian government anytime soon.
posted by potrzebie at 10:09 PM on December 22, 2022 [21 favorites]

Lol, jinx suelac
posted by potrzebie at 10:09 PM on December 22, 2022

I just looked up my abandoned livejournal and the last post was in 2009. I joined Twitter in 2009. My LJ self could not imagine the social media nightmare of today.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:21 PM on December 22, 2022 [6 favorites]

Aw, Diaryland! I had a blog there once.

Valente is one of my favorite writers and by God she put her finger on the anger and grief I've felt about Twitter. Thank you for posting this, Etrigan.
posted by emjaybee at 10:38 PM on December 22, 2022 [5 favorites]

I was a Prodigy teen, born in 81 and went online in 93. It was a transformative time and I’ve moved communities often. Without Twitter, I don’t know where to promote my writing and podcast.

On Prodigy I started what I believe was the first online support group for teens with Crohn’s Disease. That led to awards, speaking engagements, and participation in books. These online communities are too important to be sucked dry by the vampires among us.
posted by Servo5678 at 10:49 PM on December 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

I'm pretty sure the rise of social media killed my online friend groups. And then Russia ruined LJ.

I generally don't like SM. I'm forced to be on Facebook (under an alias) due to theater because all the show news, videos, and who got covid this week gets posted there, so I've adapted to deal with it, but short posts and/or a pic just isn't the same as it used to be for meaty reading updates.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:57 PM on December 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

Excellent rant-- and aside from losing connections, a lot of writing can get lost, too.

One thing-- I tried to get the free subscription to Garbagetwon (occasional public post) and I got charged $55 for a year's subscription. I cancelled, but that just means it doesn't autonew. I can't get the $55 dollars back. I don't know whether it was my mistake (I try to be careful, but who knows) or theirs. Handle substack with tongs.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:00 AM on December 23, 2022

I was listening to this podcast from 99 percent invisible last night, about how radio in the US became dominated by right-wing viewpoints. You could say that the entrenched conservative forces in society collude to make sure that they retain power by blocking progressive media.

We are also starting to learn a lot more about what it means to have larger online social groupings, and for a lot of people it's not great. I'm very happy to see words like 'parasocial' enter the conversation, and also that influencers are now more easily recognised for what they are. If we are just going to see the same problems repeating themselves again and again with online social spaces, how long until people just get fed up, in the same way that people stopped 'tuning in and dropping out' at the end of the hippy era?
posted by The River Ivel at 2:30 AM on December 23, 2022 [4 favorites]

She's not wrong.
posted by chavenet at 3:30 AM on December 23, 2022

archive link
posted by DarkForest at 5:28 AM on December 23, 2022

I am the Oregon Trail Generation, thank you very much. I neither enjoy being "cuspy" or, the very gross, "Xennial." Just...no.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:00 AM on December 23, 2022 [6 favorites]

Excellent rant-- and aside from losing connections, a lot of writing can get lost, too.

That's so true. Around 2005-2010, I read a lot of blogs, and an awful lot of them are gone now. A few of them were outstanding, yeah, but mostly it was just pretty good stuff, and collectively it made a big impact on me. I can't go back and read most of those essays now because they're gone and often not archived anywhere.

Also - and this is a trivial thing, really - there was some good fanfic I read and now it's gone! A lot of terrible fanfic is gone too, but there are some stories I'd like to revisit that people never, eg, migrated to Ao3. People used to talk about downloading particular fics and I'd think "what kind of a weird nerd thing is that, like you're going to make a binder of your little alpha/omega mpreg stories or what" but those people were wiser than me and had mostly been on the internet longer.

How short the life, the art so long to learn!
posted by Frowner at 6:15 AM on December 23, 2022 [10 favorites]

In some ways, not being able to go back to some of my earliest social media postings is kind of a blessing, if sort of a mixed one, because some of that early stuff from me--which, if we're going back about twenty years, was when I started posting on the Warren Ellis Forum--is pretty embarrassing, as I was in the process of getting divorced and my alcoholism was kicking into high gear. But not all of it was bad or embarrassing, and yeah, there's not just the loss of personal content but also having to shift gears to adjust to a new social medium and its particular rules and strengths and shortcomings. The recent threads about Mastodon and all the Twitter refugees feeling out of place and irritating the veteran Mastos bears witness to that.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:50 AM on December 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

People built the communities on the Web. For people. It takes years of work and the contributions of many. And every time we make something good, it gets co-opted and transformed into crap by VC-backed companies who pledge up and down to support what is, only to kill it with a thousand cuts. That's a tragic loss of human connection, invention and wonder.

Her article is a history, and a cautionary lament, paired with calls to action. "Stop buying things and start talking to each other." "We are wherever we gather." "We make our place when we’re together. We make our magic when we connect.."

We keep having to dust ourselves off when communities get sold for parts. We're tired, and rightly so, but maybe the ones who keep going can learn and be more wary next time. Take steps to ensure that no one person owns the village square; be ready to pull up stakes and make a new place if we have to.

We remake the present into the future. This piece is a map that looks back, sees past missteps, notes our progress and points to a better way forward.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 8:07 AM on December 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

I feel like this newsletter by DongWon Song is a good companion to the Valente piece. (Song is a literary agent; the piece comes from that angle.)

And while I'm kind of sorry that my old blog is long since lost to the ether, I'm kind of glad, too. I don't particularly want a permanent record that people can dredge up about me. The fact that Discord and Mastodon will be lost to the ether over time in a way that Twitter wasn't is a feature, not a bug. At least with livejournal I could take it all under filter. But I really do miss the friends I made there and lost track of when the community dispersed.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 9:08 AM on December 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

I still feel the loss of Barbelith all these years later. Sadly, it is my understanding that there were some community members there that were responsible for its demise, and while I will never know their names, they are dead to me. Barbelith was my first real internet forum home; it was how I eventually met my husband, and how I made amazing UK friends I am still in contact with even now. (Barbelith's closing moved most of us first to FB, then to Twitter, and now? I have no idea. But hey, I hope someone does a Barbelith veterans Mastodon, and then I will join.)
posted by Kitteh at 9:16 AM on December 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Valente is lucky LJ is gone because she made some posts that were questionable even by early 2000s standards, and with those gone she was able to reinvent herself.
posted by betweenthebars at 10:30 AM on December 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ah, yes, especially the ones about Japan.
posted by tavella at 11:14 AM on December 23, 2022

If you really think Valente was complaining about technological advances, you need to reread that piece, or back up your claim.
Otherwise it looks like you're just casting around for some way to denigrate her.
posted by emjaybee at 12:00 PM on December 23, 2022 [5 favorites]

she was able to reinvent herself.

Or, as one may think of it more charitably, she was able to grow from her early 20s.
posted by Etrigan at 12:49 PM on December 23, 2022 [16 favorites]

I didn't realize it when I did it, but setting up Twitter to auto-delete my posts after 14 days insured that I would never fool myself into thinking anything I did there mattered.
posted by COD at 1:49 PM on December 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

I love this piece, but I can't help but take issue with the rose-colored glasses of Twitter's ability to help creatives find an audience. For every person on the platform who found modest fame, there were thousands lost to the obscurity of the algorithm.

Artists have been complaining about algorithmic feeds for years, and how they prop up a few very popular names (see: Instagram for one of the worst offenders) at the expense of stumbling across the indie and the weird. I don't doubt that Twitter was a cozy home for many, but a space that levels the playing field of exposure to potential audience members is sorely needed.

I read a Tumblr post by an indie comic artist that lamented that they have no idea what to tell young creators just starting out who want to know how to build an audience and break into the business anymore, because the luck factor in artistic success is now on steroids with the pursuit of social media virality.
posted by petiteviolette at 4:52 PM on December 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

I def made those binders, Frowner!
posted by pelvicsorcery at 6:24 PM on December 23, 2022

Artists have been complaining about algorithmic feeds for years, and how they prop up a few very popular names (see: Instagram for one of the worst offenders) at the expense of stumbling across the indie and the weird. I don't doubt that Twitter was a cozy home for many, but a space that levels the playing field of exposure to potential audience members is sorely needed.

Fiddleware (Federated Middleware)?*

I have long advocated for user choice in how our online feeds are organized and moderated as the only effective way for a democratic society to deal with this complexity and nuance. Enabling such choice has recently gained advocates who see a role for “middleware” services that act as user-agents between users and their media distribution systems. I envision this not as choosing a single middleware service to be granted sole control, but as composing and steering combinations of services to blend a range of algorithms that distill selected sources of human judgments – and to use them to draw from a multiplicity of what I called confederated systems as far back as 2003.

posted by kliuless at 10:52 PM on December 23, 2022

your biggest microphone being crammed up a rich white man’s ass and set to reverb
posted by blue shadows at 9:06 PM on December 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

What we need, I believe, is social media as a non-profit public service - paid for and controlled by its users. Any social media which is "free" to use, but in reality is just another data plantation where giant corporations extract information from us, will betray its users just like Valente describes.
posted by Termite at 5:09 AM on December 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

• Hachyderm.io, from Side Project to 38,000+ Users and Counting - "How a self-hosted social media network aimed at the tech community dealt with a sudden wave of users fleeing Twitter's takeover by Elon Musk."
• Why a Twitter Founding Engineer Is Now All-in on Mastodon - "Blaine Cook was there at the very beginning of Twitter; now he's focused on building fediverse infrastructure that will help Mastodon scale."
• Decentralized discourse: How open source is shaping Twitter's future - "With Bluesky only recently announcing a beta signup program for Bluesky Social, an app built on the new AT Protocol, if all goes to plan, any company or developer will be able to build an app using the AT Protocol, and communicate with other apps that share that protocol (including Twitter). This means users could elect to use one specific app that presents messages in a completely different format powered by a different algorithm, and then 'lift-and-shift' all their data to an alternative down the line if their requirements change."*
• Why Would Anyone Use Another Centralized Social Media Service After This? - "And over the past few days I've been playing around with nostr, a very, very early, and very, very basic (but extraordinarily simple) new distributed social media protocol that is based on clients and relays."
• Twitter is a mess, so former employees are creating Spill as an alternative - "Terrell and Brown are announcing waitlist signups for Spill, which they describe as 'a real-time conversational platform that puts culture first.' They expect that the platform will launch in about six to eight weeks."

posted by kliuless at 5:32 AM on December 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Re:Bluesky it should be remembered that it’s a Dorsey project linked to Twitter and so absolutely not a way to get from Musk. Also loaded down with blockchain nonsense.
posted by Artw at 9:43 AM on December 27, 2022

Valente posted a (public) follow-up:

I cannot recall the last time I couldn’t keep up with the replies to a 6000 word blog post. It felt like 2009 had come back for Christmas.

But you know what doesn’t feel anything like 2009?

All those comments, replies, shares, commentary, everything. Hundreds of thousands across so many platforms.

And not one of them has told me I’m an idiot, or should kill myself, or need to shut up, or need to learn to respect our Iron Man overlord, or am a fake geek, or in any other fashion am fundamentally Wrong on the Internet.

EDIT: Mere moments after I posted this, the first comment calling me embarassing and over-emotional came sailing in to share its very important opinion. The internet will be the internet, in the end. It’s almost comforting in its predictability. Aw, precious. Way to be your authentic self!

posted by Etrigan at 10:09 AM on December 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

Guess they’re not a Metafilter reader.
posted by Artw at 10:40 AM on December 27, 2022

There is a Minsky model projection that "we face a somewhat steady state for the future of Twitter", despite Musk, Mastodon, etc.

Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign
posted by jeffburdges at 5:29 PM on December 29, 2022