I saw a funny tweet the other day about Bluesky, the Twitter competitor that got yet another boost when Elon Musk made the decision to rate limit the number of tweets that users are allowed to see on his platform. Basically, as more people were clamoring onto Bluesky, a number of users were posting about the culture and mannerisms of the space, specifically as compared to a cesspool like Twitter.
Some Bluesky user called “Chinchillazilla” (not looking into who this is) wrote that “fighting in the qts is frowned on here fyi” and to also “try to remember to do alt text here…we are consciously trying, in the early days here, to make this a less acrimonious place than Twitter was.” The tweet I saw, from @ch1w33th3d0g, observed:
While funny on a surface level — taking posting so seriously, and with such entitled authority, is, as the kids say, deeply cringe — it also got me thinking about the whole Twitter/Bluesky/death of social media situation a bit differently. In fact, it reminded me of my days as a kid on stupid message boards or forums, all of which had their own silly rules that were enforced by shockingly self-serious moderators and administrators.
If you were online in the 2000s, you are certainly aware of this, and also how it differs slightly from, for instance, subreddits or even Mastodon servers. On these forums, whether big general ones or super-niche ones, users took the cultivation and maintenance of a particular posting culture not only very seriously but also with a reverence that seems almost endearingly antiquated now.
If anything, that approach seems dead and gone for a space seeking mainstream adoption like Bluesky — it is impossible at this point to make the hordes behave, and the more that people migrate from Twitter to Bluesky, the less likely it is that these rules or norms will be enforced let alone remembered. Online posting culture is just different now, in large part specifically because of Twitter, and how its userbase, while small and narrow when compared with other platforms, has had an outsized influence on how people talk across the internet.
I’m not just talking about dril references that become part of regularspeak even if you don’t know they’re dril-isms. How people talk online, in rhythm and vocabulary, comes from Twitter, or at least it did through the 2010s (one could obviously argue that TikTok has overtaken that mantle). This is partly because unlike Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and the rest, Twitter has always been about text. It’s also just the commingling of a largely mentally ill population of posters coalescing into a new collective vernacular, almost the inverse of the style of rules and norms as constructed in the era of forums. Then, communities formed around interests or identities in spaces generally designed for them to come together; now, there is the infamous “public square” where endless communities or community-like groups clash, and there is no expectation of norms beyond vague platform codes and regulations. This might seem obvious to point out for some of you, but it’s worth emphasizing because it presents interesting questions for where the social internet can (or should) go from here.
As Kate Mannell and Eden T. Smith argue in a 2022 paper, examples of alternative social media are fraught with challenges. They look at Scuttlebutt, a decentralized and open-source platform — if you haven’t heard of it, well, that kind of confirms the challenges herein, of making something truly alternative work and catch on. Either way, their overall point is to bring us back to questions of participatory culture first introduced as web 2.0 took off in the 2000s. This was the classic promise of the internet’s ability to democratize information and cultural production. This was seen as a redistribution of power, and Twitter eventually became a symbol of that power: regular users like you and me can post whatever we want, and we can directly reply to powerful figures like celebrities or politicians, who may even respond back. Of course, even putting aside how corporatized platforms clearly prioritized growth and profit from the beginning, even Twitter was always also a space with rules of its own, as laid down from on high by its executives and top engineers. In other words, users may be able to tweet at Justin Trudeau, but realistically he has no actual incentive to respond, and moreover, no user, whether you and me or Trudeau, has a say in how Twitter organizes its platform and the rules it implements.
That’s some nitty-gritty, so what am I getting at? Mannell and Smith, building from scholar Nico Carpentier, argue that true participation in online social spaces would have to feature “the equal position of all actors in a decision-making process” — something that no corporate platform does, or would ever, provide.
As some of these alternative spaces have had their moment in the wake of Twitter’s issues, we get an opportunity to think seriously about what that would actually look like. For instance, Mastodon is structured around individual servers (called “instances”), each with their own administrators and policies, somewhat akin to the forum structure of old, but with a greater emphasis on transparency around the platform’s software and to what extent, if any, user data is mined. And yet, there is something inaccessible about Mastodon and similar platforms, which tend to require slightly more technical expertise, and they have failed thus far to attract a genuinely diverse userbase, let alone a mass. As Mannell and Smith further point out, most Mastodon users are on the most popular instances, which may seem somewhat inevitable but nevertheless puts the lie to claims of power redistribution — popularity is as important as ever. (Plus, the interface is just bad.)
Bluesky, on the other hand, remains in beta, invitation-only form, so it’s impossible at this stage to even fully assess whether it solves any of these problems, although it doesn’t seem like it does — it is, after all, still for-profit, and it’s unclear what monetization will really look like there, as execs and developers weigh using ads or subscriptions.
At any rate, it seems clear enough that a key factor in what a better social online experience could be is equalizing power relations, especially when it comes to the actual infrastructure of the platform. This doesn’t mean that every user needs to have the technical knowledge required to have a say in how things are structured, but that there’s a system in place to allow for that kind of collective participation in the building and maintenance of the platform. As a result, then social regulation won’t be controlled by the platform itself but by its users.
Anyway, this may seem like a pipe dream in the context of the corporate internet as we know it, where we are forced into technoliberal subjectivity and can hardly imagine an alternative, let alone one that is not directly inspired by the utopian illusions of the early internet. If nothing else, then, maybe once you see your quota of tweets for the day, you can use that extra time to help envision what that alternative will look like, and how we get there.
Ephemera
Josh Dzieza wrote a great investigative piece for The Verge about something we hear about a lot but rarely get such an intimate look at: the human labourers that make AI work. Also at The Verge, James Vincent looked at the relationship between scale and quality for online experience and content and how generative AI threatens to overflow the situation.
For Phenomenal World, Susannah Glickman wrote about the future of American chipmaking, the semiconductors that allow computers of any size to work. Chips may seem a bit boring, but we should consider them to be absolutely crucial to determining how power operates geopolitically today — a huge amount of the world’s chips are produced in Taiwan, which China believes is part of itself, which some foreign policy wonks are warning could kickstart World War III. So, the production of chips and who is doing it is important!
For more on this, listen to this episode of the American Prestige podcast with guest Kevin Klyman.
Ed Zitron on the further enshittification of the internet: “There’s no need to worry about the internet’s content mill hell — it’s already here, and we’ve been living in it for years. The internet we inhabit isn’t so much made for us as it is made for us to operate in. We are mice in the maze, constantly having objects put in our way or removed to see how we’ll react, or whether we’ll do the thing that someone else wants us to do. Some of us might occasionally jump a wall and surprise those experimenting on us, but as it stands, the internet has become a kleptocratic playground for billionaires to monetize our every move.”
Song Recommendation: “Barley” — Water From Your Eyes