Posts Tagged ‘social media’

2 Feb

Five years of quitting Twitter

Posted by Nolan Lawson in social media. Tagged: .

It’s been almost five years since I deleted my Twitter account. I didn’t just delete the app or deactivate – I deleted my whole account and my entire tweet history, lighting a match and burning the bridge behind me.

I don’t want to pretend to be some kind of seer, but since then, divesting yourself from social media has become a somewhat fashionable lifestyle choice. For a certain type of person, it’s the kind of pro-mental health, self-care kind of thing you might do along with going vegan or taking up Vispassana meditation. (To make it clear that I’m not above such intellectual trendiness, I’ve tried all those things too.)

In this post, I want to talk honestly about the good and the bad that comes with deleting your Twitter account, from the perspective of a tech guy who’s plugged in to several different software communities (open source, web development, Node.js, etc.).

The good

Let’s start off with the good stuff. Twitter is no longer what I check first thing in the morning and the last thing before I go to sleep. In fact, I instituted a personal rule to charge my phone outside of the bedroom altogether so that I’m not tempted to read it in bed. (I don’t always hold fast to this.)

I have my RSS feed, I have Hacker News, and I have various news outlets (Ars Technica, Wired, etc.), so there’s plenty for me to read on the internet. But unlike Twitter, I actually run out of stuff to read and eventually get bored with my phone. I consider this a plus, even if it ends up driving me towards other screens – video games in particular. But even if my lofty goal is to spend more time reading books or riding my bike, I still consider time spent with my Switch or doing crossword puzzles to be time better spent than flicking through social media.

I also disabled all notifications on my phone except for IM and email, which helps reduce the neediness of my little pocket Tamagatchi. IM notifications are invaluable for keeping up with family and friends, but my email notifications are still sometimes a source of stress, so I try to unsubscribe as much as possible from any newsletters, automated updates, and other bullshit. If my email is going to buzz in my pocket and show me a notification, I want it to be something important.

I still have a Mastodon account, and I still host a Mastodon server at toot.cafe, but I’m not very active anymore. I mostly treat it as a write-only medium. My reasons for this are various, but basically I’ve become less of a booster of Mastodon (and the fediverse in general) over time. It’s a neat idea, and it still works pretty well for the cohort of hardcore techies and tech-adjacent folks who seem to be there, but I just don’t find it super interesting any more. Sometimes I think of Mastodon as my Twitter nicotine patch – it sorta feels like Twitter, it scratches the same itch, but it’s just not nearly as compelling.

The bad

If you’re the kind of techie who uses social media to connect with your peers and build your personal brand – the kind of person who speaks at conferences, writes blog posts, talks on podcasts, etc. – then quitting Twitter is a terrible idea. My blog posts get less traffic than they used to, I don’t get invited to as many conferences anymore, and even when I do give the odd podcast interview, there’s always an awkward moment when they ask for my Twitter handle, or which social media account they should direct traffic and followers to. (I dunno, GitHub? I think I have a Reddit account?)

My main public outlet these days is my blog, and from looking at the WordPress stats, my overall traffic has taken a hit since I quit Twitter. I’ve kind of ceased to exist for a certain segment of my (former) audience, and for the rest, I only exist when someone takes pity on me and links to my blog from Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News, or a big site like CSS Tricks. (I don’t abstain from Reddit or Hacker News, but I’m also not super active there.) It feels kind of weird to have quit Twitter, and yet to relish the traffic spike from a well-timed Twitter mention.

For those people who are re-sharing my content on social media, I suspect most of them found it from their RSS feed. So RSS definitely still seems alive and well, even if it’s just a small upstream tributary for the roaring downstream river of Twitter, Reddit, etc.

Another odd downside of deleting your Twitter account is that, after a cool-down period, someone can grab your Twitter handle. I didn’t realize this was a thing, so someone has squatted on my old Twitter name, presumably because they hope to re-sell it later, or maybe because they want the SEO juice? I have no idea. I would be mad about it, but the fact that this account exists (and my old mentions on Twitter still link to it!) makes Twitter a slightly shittier place, so in my own petty way, I’m kind of glad it exists.

The mixed bag

Some things that I miss from Twitter are both good and bad. Twitter is a sprawling global conversation, and a lot of the important debates in web development (client-rendering vs server-rendering, web components vs frameworks, etc.) were born and thrive there. I miss out on a lot of those debates, and many of them could serve as good fodder for a thoughtful blog post or open-source project, so I regret not having the creative spark that comes from those conversations.

The problem is that a lot of these debates are, in my opinion, either trivial or manufactured. Twitter (like all social media) is an outrage machine, designed to goose engagement using whatever means the algorithm finds through blind optimization. I fully believe that phenomena like “the great divide” in web development wouldn’t exist without Twitter, and to the extent that it does exist in the “real world,” it’s only because it was hatched on Twitter before infecting the rest of us. Social media engagement thrives when it finds a wedge to drive between two parts of a community, where it can cause incendiary content to cross-pollinate from one camp to another, creating an endless cycle of irritation, condemnation, dunking, and flaming.

Occasionally in my RSS feed I’ll read a post that starts off by saying, “There’s been a huge debate about…” or “There’s been a recent controversy over…” and then eventually I realize the whole post is about some Twitter beef. I don’t miss being on the front lines of these kind of battles, but I do think some of these debates are worth having, so I have mixed feelings about it.

Conclusion

I don’t plan on coming back to Twitter. Mostly because I just don’t need it anymore – I’m not super active at conferences or meetups, I don’t have a workshop or service I need to sell, and so there’s little professional reason for me to be there. I like posting on my blog, but I can only hope that my content gets attention in direct correlation to the value that people derive from it. If I write a good blog post, people will read it. I try to focus on that and that alone.

Honestly, even that lifestyle – writing blog posts, watching it occasionally blow up on Hacker News and Reddit, reading occasionally scathing comments – is hard enough on my mental health. Whenever I write a blog post these days, I have a period of anxiety and dread where I worry about the potential backlash. I mitigate that a bit by carefully editing my posts to remove anything that could be misconstrued, and to occasionally have some trusted friends review a draft (thank you all!), but frankly it’s a bit sad that I even do this, because my writing has gotten decidedly more boring over the years.

Sometimes I go back and read my blog posts from 2014 and marvel at how freewheeling, irreverent, and downright joyful my writing was. I don’t really write like that anymore, because social media (and the internet in general) have conditioned me to constantly fret over negative attention. So I act as my own PR firm, carefully focus-testing and bowdlerizing my prose until it’s as dry as a slice of burnt toast. Sometimes I can escape from this trap a little bit (like I’m trying to do right now), but overall I worry that my writing has gotten worse, not better, over time. (Another worry!)

So given my inherent worry-prone nature about posting content on the internet, Twitter is probably just not right for me. The high I would get from seeing a tweet go viral and getting adulation from my peers just doesn’t outweigh the anxiety, the sleeplessness, or the careful tiptoeing and sanitization of my thoughts that come with heavy social media use. I’m already bad enough with that as it is, just with my blog; coming back to Twitter would dial that up to 11.

So I deleted my Twitter account, and I plan to keep it that way. Should you do the same? Well, I dunno. If you need it for your livelihood, then decidedly not. You should probably just see Twitter as a necessary evil and try to insulate yourself from the bad parts while profiting from the good parts. If you’re a casual user, then maybe you’ve already figured out a healthy way to live with Twitter (curating your feed, turning off the algorithmic timeline, whatever), and if so – good for you! For me, I have too much stubbornness and too little faith in my own ability to manage my social media addiction to want to give Twitter a second try.

29 May

Get off of Twitter

Posted by Nolan Lawson in Web. Tagged: , .

Twitter logo with a red "no" sign over it

Stop complaining about Twitter on Twitter. Deny them your attention, your time, and your data. Get off of Twitter.

The more time you spend on Twitter, the more money you make for Twitter. Get off of Twitter.

You at-mention @jack and call him out for the harassment and disinformation on his platform. You get a few hundred likes and retweets, each one sending your brain a little boost of serotonin. Twitter learns that you are interested in people who criticize @jack and starts to recommend you their tweets. You end up spending more time on Twitter, and advertisers learn a little bit more about you. You make @jack more money.

Get off of Twitter.

You can’t criticize Twitter on Twitter. It just doesn’t work. The medium is the message.

There’s an old joke where one fish says to the other, “How’s the water today?” And the fish responds, “What’s water?” On Twitter, you might ask, “How’s the outrage today?” (The answer, of course, is “I hate it! I’m so outraged about it!”)

Get off of Twitter.

Write blog posts. Use RSS. Use micro.blog. Use Mastodon. Use Pleroma. Use whatever you want, as long as it isn’t manipulating you with algorithms or selling access to your data to advertisers.

You’re worried about losing your influence. How about using your influence for something good? How about using it to stick it to Twitter, if you really dislike Twitter so much? Maybe if you do it, and your friends do it, then it will cause a sea change. After all, who was ever “influential” by following the crowd?

As Gandhi said (in paraphrase), “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Or as another influencer put it: “I’m starting with the man in the mirror.” Or if you prefer: “Practice what you preach.”

Get off of Twitter.

28 May

In defense of the Right Thing

Posted by Nolan Lawson in Web. Tagged: , , .

It has come to my attention that many people believe the Wrong Thing. I find this to be an intolerable state of affairs, so this is a blog post defending what is Right.

How do I know there are so many people who believe the Wrong Thing? Well because, like everyone, I use Twitter. And holy moly! My feed is chock-full of Wrong Thinkers.

Sometimes it feels like everyone in the world believes the Wrong Thing, and I’m the last lonely person clinging to what’s Right. There must be a global epidemic of Wrongness. Why else would Twitter fill my feed with so many of these dunces and ninnies and halfwits?

I don’t even follow these people. Why should they be in my timeline, unless the whole world is full of Wrong people?

Every time I see their Wrong tweets, I seethe with rage and eagerly click to read the full thread. I might spend hours this way, thumbing through Wrong tweets. “How can so many people be so Wrong?” I’ll say to myself, shaking my head as I continue to scroll.

Sometimes when I find a really Wrong tweet, I’ll quote it and tweet it out with the perfect devastating repartee. That way, more people who agree with me are exposed to these Wrong views. That’ll teach ’em!

I do have to commend the others who proudly rise in defense of what is Right. On Twitter, I often see them caught in an epic battle with the Wrongers – “34 people are talking about this!” Well, here comes a 35th, joining the fray to fight the good fight.

To be honest, I sometimes get tired of feeling angry all the time. But how can I not be, when the world is full of people who are so very Wrong?

Curiously, the Wrongers seem to come from all sides of any issue, and they are legion. People who use margarine instead of butter, people who peel the banana from the top instead of the bottom, people who crack a boiled egg from the big end rather than the small end. These are exactly the things that drive me nuts, and somehow my feed is full of people who believe the opposite of me on precisely those issues! Sometimes I feel utterly embroiled, helpless, a tiny voice of reason shouting against an angry mob of Wrong Thinkers.

But sadly, this is just how the world is these days. The world is full of people arguing, calling each other out, or watching a fight unfold with the horrified glee of a driver craning their neck to get a good look at a car wreck.

I know this is how the world is, because I see it on Twitter. And Twitter is an utterly unbiased mirror of the world, with no algorithms that subtly push the discussion in one direction or the other, regardless of whether it is good for discourse or compassion or human well-being but only whether it is good for Twitter.

15 Nov

Why I’m deleting my Twitter account

Posted by Nolan Lawson in Web. Tagged: , .

When I first got on the Internet back in the 90’s, it felt like a cool underground rock concert. Later on, it seemed like a vast public library, maybe with a nice skate park nearby. Today it feels more like a shopping mall. The transition happened so gradually that I barely noticed it.

Hanging out with your friends at the mall can be fun. But it can also be tiring. You’re constantly surrounded by ads, cheery salespeople are trying to get you to buy stuff, and whatever you eat in the food court is probably not great for your health.

For the past few years, I’ve subsisted on a media diet that mostly came from Twitter, consisting of “snackable” news articles with catchy headlines, shareable content with wide appeal (baby koala cuddles baby cat, how cute!), and righteous outrage at whatever horrible political thing was happening that day.

Twitter was often the first thing I looked at when I picked up my phone in the morning, and the last thing I browsed late into the night, endlessly flicking my thumb over the feed in the hope that something good would pop up. The light of the smartphone was often the only thing illuminating my bedroom before I finally turned in (always much too late).

All of this content – cat pictures, articles, memes, political hysteria – came streaming into my eyeballs in a rapid and seemingly random order, forcing my brain to make sense of the noise, to find patterns in the data. It’s addictive.

But the passivity of it, and the endless searching for something good to watch, meant that for me Twitter had essentially become television. Browsing Twitter was no more edifying than flipping through channels. At the end of a long, multi-hour session of Twitter-surfing, I could barely recall a single thing I had read.

Social media as public performance

Twitter is unlike television in a few crucial aspects, though. First off, the content is algorithmically selected, so whatever I’m seeing is whatever Twitter has determined to be most likely to keep my eyes on the screen. It’s less like I’m surfing through channels and more like the TV is automatically flipping from channel to channel, reading my eye movement and facial expressions to decide what to show next.

Second, Twitter has become an inescapable part of my professional life. My eight thousand-odd Twitter followers are a badge of honor, the social proof that I am an important person in my field and worthy of admiration and attention. It also serves as a measure of my noteworthiness in comparison to others. If someone has more followers than me, then they’re clearly more important than I am, and if they have less, well then maybe they’re an up-and-comer, but they’re certainly not there yet.

(This last statement may sound crass. But any avid Twitter user who hasn’t sized someone up by their follower count is either lying to themselves, or is somehow immune to the deep social instincts that mark us as primates.)

For the kinds of professionals who go to conferences, give public talks, and write blog posts, Twitter serves as a sort of “Who’s Who,” except that everyone is ranked by a single number that gives you a broad notion of their influence and prominence.

I’m sure many of my friends from the conference and meetup scene will look at my announcement of deleting my Twitter account as a kind of career suicide. Clearly Nolan’s lost his mind. He’ll never get invited to a conference again, or at the very least he won’t be given top billing. (Conference websites usually list their speakers in descending order of Twitter followers. How else can you tell if a speaker is worth listening to, if you don’t know their follower count?)

Much of that is probably true. I used to get a lot of conference invites via Twitter DMs, and those definitely won’t be rolling in anymore. Also, anyone who wants to judge my influence by a single number is going to have a hard time: they’ll have to piece it together from blog posts and search results instead. Furthermore, my actual influence will be substantially reduced, as most of the hits to my blog currently come from Twitter.

Why I’m done with Twitter

Thing is, I just don’t care anymore. I’ve spent years pouring my intellectual and emotional labor into Twitter, and for countless reasons ranging from harassment to Nazis to user-hostile UI, platform, and algorithm choices, they’ve demonstrated that they don’t deserve it. I don’t want to add value to their platform anymore.

To me, the fact that Twitter is so deeply embedded into so many people’s professional lives is less a reason to resign myself to keep using it, and more a reason to question and resist its dominance. No single company should have the power to make or break someone’s career.

Twitter has turned a wide variety of public and quasi-public figures – from Taylor Swift to a dude who speaks at tech conferences – into brand ambassadors for Twitter, and that ought to worry us. Despite what it claims, Twitter is not a neutral platform. It’s an advertising company with a very specific set of values, which it expresses both in how it optimizes for its core constituents (advertisers) and how it implements its moderation policies (poorly).

Well, it may indeed be a bad career move for Taylor Swift to abandon her Twitter account, but for a (very) minor public figure like myself, it’s a small sacrifice to make to knock Twitter down a peg. My career will survive, and my mental health can only improve by spending less time flicking a smartphone screen into the late hours of the night.

That’s why I’m deleting my account rather than just signing out. I want my old tweets to disappear from threaded conversations, from embeds in blog posts – anything that’s served from twitter.com. I want to punch a hole in Twitter’s edifice, even if it’s a small one.

I’ve backed up my tweets so that anyone who wants to see them still can. I’m also still fairly active on Mastodon, and as always, folks can follow me via my blog’s RSS feed or contact me via email.

This isn’t me saying goodbye to the Internet – this is me saying goodbye to the shopping mall. But you can still find me at the rock concert, in the public library, and in the park.

23 Oct

What is Mastodon and why is it better than Twitter

Posted by Nolan Lawson in Web. Tagged: .

Mastodon is a Twitter alternative that recently released version 2.0 and has been steadily growing over the past year. It’s also a project that I’ve been dedicating an inordinate amount of my time to since last April – helping write the software, running my own instance, and also just hanging out. So I’d like to write a bit about why I think it’s a more humane and ethical social media platform than Twitter.

Much of the discussion around Mastodon centers on the fact that the flagship instance explicitly bans Nazis. This is true, and it remains a great selling point for Mastodon, but it also kind of misses the point. Mastodon isn’t a single website run by a single company with a single moderation policy. It’s a piece of open-source software that anybody can use, which in practice means it’s a network of independent websites that can run things however they like.

There is no company behind Mastodon. There’s no “Mastodon, Inc.” Mastodon doesn’t have a CEO. The code is largely written by a 24-year old German dude who lives off Patreon donations, even though he’s a very talented web developer and could probably make a lot more money if he joined the industry. He works on Mastodon because it’s his passion.

What this means is that if someone wanted to take Mastodon’s code and build a competing service, they could do so trivially in a matter of minutes. And they do. The original instance, mastodon.social, isn’t the only server – in fact, it’s not even the biggest one anymore. There are over a thousand active instances, and it’s become easy enough that Masto.host can even create one at the click of a button.

In practice, though, these Mastodon instances don’t compete with each other so much as they form a giant constellation of interconnected communities. Users from any server can read, follow, and reply to users on another server, assuming neither of the two servers is blocking the other.

The closest analogy is email: if you use Gmail, you can still communicate with someone who uses Outlook.com and vice-versa, because they both rely on the same underlying system (email). Through its own underlying systems, Mastodon (as well as compatible software like Friendica, GNU Social, and postActiv) forms a network of independent sites referred to as the “fediverse,” or federation of servers.

Why this is better than Twitter

The problem with Twitter is that its incentives are completely misaligned with those of its users. Twitter makes its money from advertising, which means that its goal is to keep your eyes glued to the screen for as long as possible, and to convince you to interact with ads. Its goal is not to keep you safe from harassment, or to ban dangerous extremists, or to ensure your psychological well-being. Its goal is to make advertisers money by selling them an engaged audience.

This is why Twitter will never #BanTrump, even though many have called for it after he began threatening North Korea on the platform. From Twitter’s perspective, Donald Trump increases engagement. Donald Trump gets eyeballs. If Donald Trump started a nuclear war on Twitter then hey, all the better, because Twitter would get a massive boost in traffic, at least right up until the point the bombs started raining down. Twitter even uses Trump in some of its advertising, which gives you an idea of how they feel about him.

Mastodon, by contrast, isn’t run on advertising. Well, instances could add advertising if they wanted to, but I’m not aware of any that do. Most of them, including the flagship, are run on donations from their users. Others get a bit more creative: cybre.space, for instance, allows free signups for one hour each day, but if you donate you can get an instant invite. capitalism.party is an interesting experiment where every signup costs $5. social.coop is run as a co-op. The possibilities are endless, since the underlying code is open-source.

What these instances all have in common is that they’re not driven by the insatiable appetite of marketers for clicks and engagement – instead, their goal is to make as warm and hospitable a place for their users as possible. The incentives of the people who run the platform are aligned with the incentives of the users.

Ultimately, this is why Mastodon instances can implement the kinds of moderation policies that their users clamor for (including banning Nazis). Most instances only have a few dozen to a few thousand active users, and they’re often organized based on shared interests, languages, or nationalities. This means that each instance tends to be small enough and like-minded enough that they can have fairly nitpicky moderation policies (or policies that adapt to local laws and customs), and it’s not too overwhelming for a small group of sympathetic and highly-motivated admins to handle.

Privacy and respect for the user

There are a lot of other benefits to Mastodon’s lack of an advertising model. For one, as a Mastodon user you’re not subjecting yourself to the adware, spyware, and bloatware that we’ve come to expect from much of the modern web. To see what I mean, here’s a screenshot of my instance, toot.cafe, compared to Twitter.com.

creenshots of Twitter vs Mastodon, showing Twitter loading 3.48MB of JS vs 990.84KB on toot.cafe

Besides the refreshing lack of advertising on the Mastodon site (and toot.cafe’s charming purple theme), you might observe that Mastodon is loading less than a meg of JavaScript, whereas Twitter loads a generous 3.5MB. A lot of that extra heft is probably just standard web bloat, but if you have an ad blocker or tracker blocker installed, then you can see another dimension to the story.

Screenshot of Ghostery showing 4 trackers blocked on Twitter.com vs 0 for toot.cafe

According to Ghostery, Twitter.com is loading 4 separate trackers, including Google Analytics, TellApart, Twitter Analytics, and Twitter Syndication. (Those last 3 are all owned by Twitter, so who knows why they need 3 separate trackers for each.) Whereas on the Mastodon site, Ghostery found 0 total trackers.

Screenshot of uBlock origin showing 14 requests blocked for Twitter vs 0 for toot.cafe

Looking at uBlock Origin, we can see it needed to block 14 requests on Twitter.com, or 9% of the total. On the Mastodon site, though, uBlock didn’t need to block anything.

Beyond the lack of ads and trackers, though, these privacy benefits accrue to the data you share with the website itself. On Twitter, you’re handing over your tweets, browsing habits, and photo metadata to a large VC-funded company that makes no bones in its privacy policy about all the various ways it feels entitled to use and sell that data. The terms of service also make it clear that once you post something, Twitter can do whatever it wants with it.

Screenshot of https://twitter.com/en/tos#usContent starting from "By submitting, posting or displaying Content..."

A snippet of Twitter’s terms of service.

Now compare this to Mastodon. On Mastodon, image metadata is stripped by default, links show up as (wait for it) actual links instead of tracking redirects, and some instances even go so far as to specify in their terms of service that you’re not relinquishing any copyright over your content and your data will never be sold.

Screenshot of mastodon.art's guidelines, saying "All content is ⓒ each artist & cannot be distributed or used without prior permission by the respective Mastodon.ART artist."

A snippet of mastodon.art‘s terms of service.

It’s such a far cry from the way we’re used to being treated by online services, with their massive legalese-laden EULAs stripping us of the right to do anything beyond gripe at the rough way we’re being manhandled, that using Mastodon can almost feel like browsing a web from a parallel universe.

So Mastodon is a paradise, right?

I’m not going to pretend that Mastodon is devoid of moderation problems. Yes, the flagship instance bans Nazis and other malcontents, as do most of the other large instances (including my own). There are plenty of instances with their own policies, though, and there’s nothing in the software to prevent them from doing so. So if you want to use an instance that harbors Nazis, or even just libertarians or free-speech advocates, then you can certainly find them.

As you can imagine, though, a right-wing instance that brags about its tolerance toward fascists is not likely to get along with a left-wing instance that bills itself as “anticapitalist”. Thus you will find lots of instances that block each other, creating a situation where you might discover vastly different content and vastly different people depending on which instance you sign up with.

This goes beyond straightforward disagreements between the political left and right. Every so often in the Mastodon community, a serious conflict will arise between instances. Often it starts because two users on two different instances got into a fight with each other, the admins got involved, and they disagreed on how to resolve the dispute. Sometimes it’s the admins themselves who started the fight. Either way, the admins end up criticizing or disavowing each other, the public timeline gets filled with debates on who’s right or wrong, and ultimately one group of instances may decide to block or silence another group. We call this “the discourse.”

“The discourse” tends to flare up every month or so, and when it does there’s usually a lot of moaning about how much drama there is on the fediverse. This lasts for a day or two and then things go back to normal, albeit with a slightly more bifurcated community than we started with.

Discourse and disintegration

I don’t enjoy “the discourse,” and I tend to agree with folks who argue that it could be alleviated if Mastodon had better tools for resolving inter-admin conflicts. I don’t think this problem can ever be completely eliminated, though. Human beings are just naturally inclined to seek the company of those they agree with and shun those they disagree with. This has the unfortunate effect of creating filter bubbles, but it turns out human beings also have a boundless appetite for filter bubbles, as evidenced by the churches, clubs, meetups, and political parties where we seek those who are similar to us and give a cold shoulder to outsiders.

I don’t believe it’s Mastodon’s job to correct the problems caused by the right to free association. But Mastodon could improve the process of communities splitting into smaller, more harmonious networks of people with shared values and mutual tolerance for one another.

Furthermore, a lot of these disputes boil down to a difference of opinion over what constitutes harassment, abuse, hate speech, etc. So in a way, “the discourse” can be seen as a testament to the seriousness with which these subjects are treated on Mastodon. Instance admins care so much about the well-being of their users and protecting them from disturbing content, that they routinely argue and even block each other over the best way to implement it.

Now compare that situation to Twitter. On Twitter, there’s one moderation policy, and if you don’t like it: tough. Whereas on Mastodon, if you don’t like your instance’s policy, you can always switch to another one. (And there’s work in progress to make that migration easier.)

Conclusion

Mastodon is not perfect. The software is still rough in some places, the underlying protocols (OStatus and ActivityPub) are still getting hammered out at the W3C, and the community devolves into tiresome bickering more often than I’d like.

But I still have more faith in Mastodon than I do in Twitter, whose user growth has flatlined and whose profits are nonexistent, and thus will have to resort to increasingly desperate measures to satisfy its investors, who are still waiting for a sweet return on investment for all those eyeballs they bought. I expect this will mean more promoted tweets, more ways to promote tweets, and ultimately less value for Twitter’s users, as they become increasingly drowned in a sea of brand accounts trying to sell them a hamburger, fake news trying to swing an election, and bots trying to do who knows what. Meanwhile the harassment problem will never be Twitter’s main priority, despite what their CEO says, because as long as controversy and conflict are good for grabbing eyeballs, they’re good for Twitter’s bottom line.

The main reason I’m hopeful about Mastodon is that it’s an opportunity to learn from Twitter’s mistakes and to experiment with fresh ideas for improving social media. For instance, how about disabling public follower counts, since they can make us feel like we’re living in a Black Mirror episode where everyone’s self-worth is determined by a single number? (In fact witches.town already does this; every user’s number is a cheeky 666.) Or how about removing the “quote-repost” feature, since we saw the nasty dog-piling it enabled on Twitter? Or how about adding features that encourage users to log off every once in a while, so that social media doesn’t turn into an addictive slot machine?

All of these things are possible in Mastodon, because the code is open-source and the servers belong to the users. We can even tinker with these ideas at the instance level, to test how something pans out at the small scale before bringing it to a wider audience. Instead of Twitter’s one-size-fits-all approach, we can tailor social media to fit the needs of every community, with local admins who are motivated to help because they’re moderating a small group of like-minded people rather than 300 million of them.

Mastodon can feel like a return to another time, when the web was small and it felt possible to actually have an impact on the websites we use every day. But it’s also a glimpse into the post-Twitter future that we need, if we want to have control over our data, our minds, and our public discourse.

Interested in Mastodon? Check out joinMastodon.org or instances.social for help finding an instance to join. If you’re not sure, I’d recommend toot.cafe (my own), cybre.space (cyberpunk themed), mastodon.art (for artists), awoo.space (focus on safety), or for general interests: mastodon.social, icosahedron.website, or octodon.social.

23 Aug

Burnout and Twitter fatigue

Posted by Nolan Lawson in Web. Tagged: , .

I suppose it should come as no surprise that the author of “What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer” is suffering from burnout, but to be honest it caught me off-guard. Even after writing it, I thought I was just going through a rough patch, but in retrospect it’s impossible to call what I’ve been feeling by any other name.

In the six months since I wrote that post, I’ve largely abandoned my involvement in PouchDB as well as dozens of other open-source projects. I’ve stepped away from the social telephone that only brings bad news and let the GitHub notifications pile up on my doorstep. (Over a thousand now, but who’s counting?) I’ve stopped going to conferences and only written one new blog post, which had actually been in draft for several months and so barely qualifies. In short, I display all the symptoms of burnout.

I could rehash the same material from that blog post, but really it’s only part of the story. Dealing with a constant flood of negative attention on your open-source projects is enough to wear anybody down, but that’s only a proximate cause. This story is best told against a backdrop of general malaise and world-weariness, which perhaps other folks in the tech industry can identify with.

In this post, I’m going to talk about one major stage of my burnout, which was the end of my love affair with Twitter. There’s more to cover on the subject of burnout, but hopefully this will serve as a good starting point.

2016: the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year

It’s become an internet cliché to say that 2016 was a terrible year, but last year’s US election truly shocked me. It also shook me out of a lot of my complacency over the direction of the tech industry and of the world in general. I consider myself a centrist (or perhaps center-left), but the election of a man as obviously vile and odious as Donald Trump left me, like many others, grasping for explanations.

2016 marked a worldwide rise in authoritarianism and illiberalism, and it’s hard to pin down to a single cause. (For a full review, The Retreat of Western Liberalism comes closest.) A lot of ink has already been spilled on the subject, but what I feel most qualified to talk about is the role technology played in the election. It wasn’t a starring role, but if 2016 were a theater play, technology might have fit as the mischievous trickster, sowing confusion and distrust and ultimately helping the baddies on their way.

Of course, what I’m talking about is social media. Twitter is well-known as Donald Trump’s favorite megaphone, and Facebook, for its part, also helped to spread rumors, lies, and propaganda that not only boosted extremists and conspiracy theorists, but also led to a general erosion of public trust in our media and institutions. We no longer have a common set of facts we can all agree upon; we only have bombast and hearsay, shouted across the political divide. Integrity and truth no longer matter; only who can get the sharpest zingers and the juiciest headlines that deliver clicks and eyeballs.

None of this should be surprising given what both Twitter and Facebook are. Fundamentally, they are marketing tools designed to promote the most virulent memes (in Dawkins’ sense of the word, as a catchy idea that travels well) and thus maximize “engagement” and “sharing.” Their algorithms act as a force of natural selection on a candidate population of quips, one-liners, clickbait, and repartees to select only those best-suited to tap into our basest human emotions, so that they get shared and reposted and thus infect the maximum number of brains possible.

Facebook and Twitter are platforms where subtlety and nuance get lost in a sea of paranoid accusations, wild hyperbole, vicious put-downs, and smug preaching-to-the-choir. They are platforms where the sensationalist headline gets thousands of retweets, and the sheepish retraction (if it exists) gets less than a hundred. (Guess which one people remember.) In short, they are platforms that are tailor-made for marketing, and thus for its public-sector twin, propaganda.

With social media, it’s as if the Axis powers no longer had to distribute leaflets via airplane, but could instead just whip up some catchy headlines like “You won’t believe why the Allies can’t win the war” and “11 reasons the resistance movement is a flop.” Toss enough of those into social media – it doesn’t even matter which ones are true or false, and you can tweak the headlines as you go – and you’ve got a recipe for a public discourse that sounds less like that of an informed democracy and more like the swirling cacophony of everybody’s id talking at the same time.

Screenshot from "Dunkirk" showing soldier holding leaflet saying "we surround you"

Credit: Dunkirk

I work for a browser vendor, and I’ve even contributed code to a JavaScript library that appears on Twitter’s frontend (LocalForage, used on Twitter’s mobile site). So in 2016 I came to feel implicitly responsible for the building of a technical infrastructure that, at this moment, looks to me like the grotesque monster at the end of Akira slouching its way towards Bethlehem to devour what’s left of the civilized world. It’s not exactly a vision that makes me feel chipper when I’m getting ready for work in the morning.

Twitter fatigue

More than anything, 2016 was the year when I started to question my Twitter addiction, and to resolve to use it less and less. Today I don’t even have the Twitter app installed, and I barely visit the mobile site either. Most of my idle thoughts go to Mastodon instead (which is a subject for another post).

In 2016, the tenor of Twitter seemed to me to change dramatically for the worse. Suddenly, everything became politicized. Somehow the newfound eagerness to howl bloody murder at one’s political opponents translated into an eagerness to howl at everyone about everything. Increasingly I felt I was watching people break off into rival factions and hurl insults at each other.

Perhaps I felt this most directly when I was attacked for a slide in a presentation I gave at Fronteers Conf saying “In 2016, it’s okay to build a website that doesn’t work without JavaScript.” I already covered that surreal experience in this post, but essentially a photo of me made the rounds on social media, and without even knowing who was pictured or what the context of the talk was, people decided I needed to be taken down a peg. And so I watched my Twitter feed devolve into a nasty pile-on of insults, snark, and condemnation, all because I had expressed a controversial opinion on (wait for it) a programming language.

I have nothing against Fronteers Conf, and I appreciate that many of the conference organizers and attendees defended me on Twitter when the discussion started to take a turn for the ugly. But honestly, this incident is one of the main reasons I stopped speaking at conferences.

At tech conferences, you’re encouraged to “interact” via Twitter, which is a platform not known for valuing nuance or context. So instead of my 40-minute talk being about, you know, the talk, its defining moment was a bite-sized nugget blasted out on social media, as well as the ensuing uproar. (I noticed that most of the audience had their eyes glued to their phones for the last 20 minutes after that slide, so certainly what I said in those moments didn’t matter.)

Essentially, everyone on Twitter decided that it was time for the Two Minutes Hate, and mine was the face that needed to be snarled at. I got a small taste of the Justine Sacco experience, and frankly it felt awful. Moreover, it didn’t feel like a good trade-off for the hours poured into preparing a talk, practicing it, and flying out to the conference venue.

This experience has also made me ambivalent about all the other moral crusades that seem to be carried out regularly on Twitter these days. Did the target really deserve it? Or was it just a clumsy gaffe brought about by jetlag, a half-hearted joke that landed badly, or a poorly-worded slide (mea culpa), and so maybe we should cut them some slack?

Or, even if they deserved it, is all the wailing and pearl-clutching really good for the rest of us? It certainly earns us likes and retweets, which can feel like virtue in the heat of the moment. But the more I see these dog-piles, the more I get the sense that what we’re feeling isn’t the noble élan of the virtuous, but instead the childish glee of having the unpopular kid on the playground laying crumpled at your feet and the crowd at your back. (Or the relief of being in the crowd, and not on the ground getting dirt kicked into your face.)

Breaking up with Twitter is hard to do

In the tech industry, though, quitting Twitter is no easy feat. Especially if you work in developer relations or evangelism, Twitter might be a fundamental part of your job description: promoting your company’s content, answering questions, “engaging the community,” etc. Your follower count, especially if it numbers in the thousands or tens of thousands, may also be seen as a job asset that’s hard to give up.

Twitter itself also serves as a personal identifier in an industry where schmoozing and networking can be critical career boosters. At developer conferences, speakers often introduce themselves using their Twitter handle (which might be discreetly emblazoned on every slide) and then end the talk by imploring their audience to follow them on Twitter. It’s not even necessary to say “Twitter” or use the Twitter logo; if you put an @-sign in front of it, there’s no confusion about which social network you’re referring to.

In blog posts, it’s also common to link to someone’s Twitter handle when you mention them by name. Forget your personal blog or myname.com – twitter.com/myname acts as your unique identifier, and the preferred way of discovering your work, contacting you, and judging your “influencer” status by your number of followers. Think of it as your personal baseball card, complete with your photo, team (company) affiliation, and key career stats.

Twitter is so inescapably embedded in the tech industry, especially in my corner of it (JavaScript/web/whatever you want to call it) that it can be maddening if you’ve resolved to quit it. For better or worse, it’s where news hits first, it’s where software releases and blog posts are announced, and it’s how you keep up with friends and colleagues in the industry.

The irony is not lost on me that, if I even want people to read this blog post, I’m going to need to post it to Twitter. Such is the degree of Twitter’s dominance, at least in the crowd I run with. To some extent, if you’re not on Twitter, you’re just not part of the conversation.

Alternatives do exist. For a hot moment last April, I was hoping that Mastodon (ad-free, open-source, no algorithmic timeline) might build up enough momentum to overtake Twitter, but unfortunately that wave seems to have crested. That said, I’m still betting on it in the form of running my own Mastodon server, despite having few illusions that it can eclipse Twitter anytime soon. But again, that’s a subject for another post.

One thing my personal exodus toward Mastodon did teach me, though, is that I can live without social media. Not only am I spending more time on Mastodon than on Twitter these days, but I’m spending less time on social media in general, to which I credit both sleeping better and feeling less anxious and distracted all the time. No more staying up late to read about the scandal du jour or hearing hot takes on the latest political calamity that, this time, will surely bring about the end of the world. No more watching people tear each other down over petty grievances, or hearing the sanctimonious echo-chamber sermons of those utterly convinced of their own righteousness.

With less time devoted to social media, I’m also enjoying more non-tech activities to help heal my burnout: spending time with my wife, visiting friends and family, getting back into cycling, reading books, playing guitar. I’m hoping that eventually I’ll feel well enough to hop back onto the GitHub treadmill, although it’s tough because it’s only when I stepped off that I realized how fast the dang thing was going.

Advice for Twitter expats

What are the good alternatives to Twitter? Besides Mastodon (which is really more of a friendly chat room these days), I’ve found you can get decent tech news from:

  • Hacker News (Yeah yeah, just don’t read the comments. Or read n-gate for a satirical take.)
  • Lobsters (Like HN, but more technical.)
  • EchoJS (A bit spammy, but occasionally there are gems.)
  • The webdev and javascript subreddits (Again, the comments don’t come recommended.)

I don’t find these sites to be a full supplement for Twitter, but maybe that’s a good thing. The less time I spend on Twitter, the less I expose my mind to toxic brain-viruses, the less I feel goaded by some titillating comment to respond with my own mental detritus (thereby stimulating others to do the same), and the less I contribute to the propaganda machine that is mayyybe bringing about the fall of civilization. All of which is pure goodness to a burned-out techie like me.