Micro-blogging, Take 2

As a social media platform, you know you've achieved success when others start cloning you. It's easy to call to mind the successful copycat platforms that, in several cases, far exceeded their predecessors:  Facebook (MySpace, Friendster), Reddit (Digg). It's a bit harder to recall the many clones that never make it (Voat, Google+, Orkut), typically because the network effects that are intrinsic to platforms' success put those with small userbases at a distinct disadvantage or because they lack the infrastructure and/or revenue to support a rapidly growing userbase. In other words, there typically aren't enough people to make the place interesting or valuable, or there are too many people to keep running/moderating the platform for free. 

But Meta/Facebook/Instagram's introduction of Threads is different in this regard, giving us a chance to see what a clone could do if it didn't have to worry about those two problems. Threads has already successfully ported 100 million users from Instagram, maintaining the network structure among interest/affinity groups and connections between established influencers and their audiences. It also has Meta's massive infrastructure at its disposal - growth won't be a problem. And so we have a rare opportunity to see if this version of a micro-blogging platform - already operating at a scale similar to the existing leader, Twitter - will be all that different than what came before. 

Mark Zuckerberg has pitched Threads as a friendlier version of Twitter. Broad generalizations about the emotional valence of any social space are inherently oversimplifying - you can find pockets of friendliness and hostility among virtually any large group of people, online or offline. Still, it's entirely possible that one space could have the tendency to be friendlier than another - that's an empirically testable claim (provided you can agree on how to measure "friendliness"). 

Before trying to determine whether Threads has or is likely to achieve this goal (or whether such a goal is desirable, or if friendliness and ideological heterogeneity are mutually exclusive), it's worth considering how it might go about achieving it. Most obviously, more content moderation might tamp down overt hostility. Less obviously, there are facets of the platform that affect linkages among users - which users' posts are visible to other users. 

By importing lists of followers and popular accounts from Instagram, Threads imported a set of cultural norms, one that evolved over the last decade and privileged attractive or attention-getting still images over words, audio, or video. Broadly speaking, there's a kind of showy-ness to Instagram, a content ranking system that rewards positivity (some would argue to toxic levels). Then there's the sociotechnical context in which Threads is being deployed - as a kind of antidote to Twitter's perceived problem with negativity, conflict, and abuse. If Twitter wasn't an especially friendly place before Elon Musk took it over, it is much less so now. This might create demand for such a place, which Threads is well positioned to serve.

Then there's that pesky algorithm - the necessarily obscure formula that controls which posts appear at the top of your feed. Despite widespread skepticism toward algorithms, its hard to imagine a popular social media platform without one, particular one that aspires not to link small groups of people together (e.g., Facebook, Discord, GroupMe, and the way some people use Snapchat) but to give everyone the chance - however remote - to command an audience. Imagine ranking YouTube or TikTok videos chronologically, or at random. Some weighted combination or popularity, engagement (e.g., number of comments or shares), and predicted affinity (amount of time you've spent on similar posts) is the best way to keep users coming back for more. 

One way to go about ranking posts is to defer to the masses - showcase whatever is broadly popular, as Twitter does with its prominently displayed list of trending topics. Another way is to tailor it to each user's preferences - the niche approach favored by TikTok. The first kind of ranking creates a "main character of the day" a target for attention and ridicule on and beyond the platform. The second kind, supposedly, creates echo chambers (though evidence is mounting that, as intuitive as this understanding of personalized ranking is, it doesn't fit what most users actually see on social media). Inheriting its structure from Instagram, Threads seems to privilege, as Kyle Chayka put it, banal celebrities and self-branding. As masspersonal media where any user can potentially reach millions of other users, Threads cannot help but encourage a kind of performativity over connecting with a small group. 

Then there's the shift from images and short video to text. The whole reason Threads is being talked about as a Twitter clone is because its primarily intended to be used for mass conversation. In their branching/nested structure (you can reply to a reply to a post, with each reply "nested" under the previous message), conversations on Threads resemble conversations on Reddit, and it will be interesting to see if future designs of Threads nudge users to engage more in the replies.

But I wonder about the brevity of text and what that does to conversations. The whole point of Twitter - what put the "micro" in "micro-blogging" - was the character limit (originally 140, upped to 280). It's well-suited to a fragmented attention universe, but I wonder if the tone of Twitter (witty, sure, but also mean) is an inevitable symptom of its mandatory brevity. Is there something about short-form writing that is bound to regress toward snark? Is that simply the nature of the medium, regardless of the combination of people and level of moderation? That's what Threads might give us a chance to observe.

Contemplating Life Without Television

The transition from analog to digital television has me thinking about turning off my TV for good. That's not to say that I'm one of these anti-TV people who thinks that it rots brains and has nothing but stupid content. I just think that we're closer than ever before to having a service that could be substituted for television, namely the internet.

In order to be substitutable, using the Internet has to feel like watching television. It has to be able to create the same affect, that same sense of relaxation, of passivity. That was never the Internet's forte, but as online video sites proliferate, acquire more quality content, and become easier to use, it becomes increasingly clear that, with a few more tweaks, it could become just like television.

The closest things so far that I've seen are Joost and Hulu, mostly b/c they make available the same content that is available on television and their interfaces are very easy to use. Still, the interface needs to be even easier. To me, bookmarked webpages are the equivalent of channels on television. With one click, I can get to a new site with (hopefully) new content. The fact that its one click, that there only has to be one choice made, is crucial to the "channel surfing" experience of watching television. I suppose the creators of the site and sites like it want the entire site to function as the frame of a reduced-choice experience similar to channel-surfing while watching television, but the choice isn't reduced enough. When I go to Hulu, I am overwhelmed with choice. Different programs, movies, genres, producers, the ability to search for actors. Type "Tom Cruise" into their search engine and you get 229 professionally (or semi-professionally) produced clips. Some of them are clips of interviews, others are parodies, others are comic commentary about Cruise, others are web series that riff on Cruise. This is all great, and we can crow about the limitless choice online video gives us relative to that of television, but this isn't necessarily desirable. I think online video takes advantage of the limitless bandwidth/shelfspace of the internet to create a new entertainment experience for viewers, but if it really wants to take a bite out of TV revenue, it needs to offer less choice.

Here's the thing: when I turn on the TV, I have only the vaguest hint of a knowledge of what I want. This is a hard thing to admit. We often define our selves by what we desire, at a given moment or over the courses of our lives. But I certainly get the feeling that sometimes, we just want to provide a general frame for a trusted entertainer or medium to try to entertain us. It is the vagueness of this frame that defines the reduced-choice, passive experience of watching television. I go to ESPN to see if there are any games on, but if I flip by Turner Classics and they're playing Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I'll stop there for a bit. I'll check the news to see if they're doing anything Obama related and to make sure the world hasn't ended, and on my way maybe I'll see a particular part of a Seinfeld episode that I feel like re-watching. I don't doubt that all of these texts will be available a la carte online. But my aforementioned television watching experience is greater (or at least different) than the sum of its parts. I didn't know what genre I wanted. You could accurately tag very show with an emotion and I still wouldn't be able to fulfill the desire that channel-surfing fulfills. Sometimes, we don't know exactly what we want (however, we do know that we don't want most commercials. Most channel surfing is caused by commercial breaks. That shit just gets in the way, and it makes television-watching less competitive in the entertainment experience marketplace, but that's another rant for another time).

Maybe that desire is dangerous and irresponsible. Maybe that desire for less choice makes us more easily controlled. But its a real desire, the desire to be passively entertained for a period of time, and television did not invent it. It is more likely that television, with its limited number of options for content, cultivated a kind of passive close-mindedness, a pathological desire to cede control more and more often to anyone or anything. It is possible that a person who watches 6 hours of television a day and doesn't use the internet has been trained to be more passive than someone who uses the internet for 6 hours a day. Still, I think the choice between television and the internet for entertainment and information (and the choice between real life interaction and online interaction for social fulfillment) prompt us to reconsider our notions of desire, choice, passivity/interactivity, and identity.

Any given site could easily recreate the experience of watching TV. The best I've encounter so far are sites or parts of sites that generate rapidly rotating lists of popular articles or links to other sites. There's always new content and its managed to pass muster with a fair amount of like-minded people at a given moment in time. Maybe the choices aren't as mood or genre-diverse as those on television, but they could be (and, with the careful eye of a good editor, they would be). Either that, or the site itself just gives me something, straight up, no choice. When I go to icanhascheezburger.com, I know what I'm getting. I go to I Can Has Cheeseburger, have a laugh at some cats for 5 minutes, and then I'm on to the next site, done w/ it for the day. However, there is no site can provide as much new quality content as a TV station, unless its some high-profile producer that's probably already on TV.

The point is, more sites need to be more forceful in telling the audience what it wants. They need to reduce choice. A site or suite of sites or some content aggregators could kill TV. All you'd need would be a laptop-to-TV cable so you could watch on your couch.

BTW, great article on Slate on this topic. "Passivity is television's main feature; we love it precisely because it asks so little of us"