Tag: Big Tech

My Hot Take On Elon Musk Officially Buying Twitter

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

At the moment, at least, the key crux of what’s going on with Elon Musk buying Twitter is a vibe shift. MAGA Republican fascists believe they have the wind against their backs now and they will finally no longer be “shadow banned.” They dream of finally getting the high engagement they believe their spicy fascist hot takes deserve from Twitter as a whole.

How embarrassing.

The fact that they’re, well, just boring given how racist and misogynistic they are with their tweets doesn’t seem to cross their minds. But they bitch a moan SO MUCH about being “shadowbanned” that now even Musk himself is getting in on the action.

All things considered, though, the MAGA Republican obsession with being “shadow banned” is just embarrassing. They believe that any slight — perceived or otherwise — is oppression in the extreme. Like any good little fascist they want leniency for themselves and strict control for speech they don’t like.

And, of course, in the end, that’s what’s going to happen if Musk abides by the wishes for the Far Right. I’m going to have to wade through a deluge of fascist speech while they won’t have to see my tweets saying they suck. No good will come of this, of course.

I think what might ultimately happen is someone from the center-Left might come up with a better social media mouse trap and Twitter will be another victim of the United States tearing itself into Blue and Red nations. Not even Twitter will survive as everyone picks a hostile camp to hide behind.

Or maybe not. Maybe, just like the country as a whole, Blues online will bend a knee to the fascists of Twitter and that will be that. For all their talk about leaving Twitter for something else, Twitter liberals may just grit their teeth and suffer the jackboot of Catturd and others.

My Hot Take On Mastodon

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Many moons ago, I briefly used the would-be Twitter alternative Mastodon, which features “toots” instead of ‘tweets.” It went into the my use of the service with a lot of enthusiasm because the service is distributed, using a concept much like the UUCP of Usenet back in the day.

I quickly soured on Mastodon for a number of reasons. One is, at that point, at least, it was literally impossible to delete your account if the mood so struck you. Also, I found the services “trigger warning” feature was abused by “woke” people who seemed determined make your life hell if you didn’t hide ANYTHING that THEY found objectionable.

It was all so subjective, that you just couldn’t please everyone and yet you also made all the woke people mad because you didn’t know whatever the orthodox they had in their mind about whatever thing you “tooted” that they didn’t like for some personal, obscure reason.

I eventually left the service after just a few days, never to be seen again. It should not be this hard to come up with at Twitter alternative. If I can think up a really strong candidate, I’m sure some Tech Bro can, too.

Use Case For My Proposed Twitter Replacement: The New York Times Reporter & Breaking News

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So, what would it be like for a power user of my little daydream social media platform? Let’s take the example of, say, a reporter for The New York Times. She would use Groups set to “Personal” for her private interaction with friends. There would be a Group for high school friends, a group for college friends, etc. And there could also be even more specific Groups for even more specific types of people in her life over the years.

But let’s get to the public element of this service.

Our hot shot New York Times reporter learns that there is big breaking news coming out of Washington. She, like a few dozen other high end content creators on the service, creates a public Group devoted to that specific event, with only a limited number of users having the right to post.

A heated discussion about this breaking new erupts and huge number of threads are created devoted to different elements of the event. In fact, the first Group she created — even with a limited number of people being able to post to it — has grown so huge and rambunctious that our reporter is forced to create three new, more specific Groups devoted to the breaking news.

But cause she has a full page to work with, she’s able to essentially write a New York Times-branded news article directly into the service. You might even figure out some sort of profit sharing agreement whereby the profits from the ads sold on her Posts would be split between the paper and the social media platform.

What’s more, as the crisis continued, our reporter pinged three of her co-workers at the paper and they hold a four way, live video conferencing discussion about what is known — and not known — about what is going on, with people being able to debate in real time what their talking about.

Anyway, all of this is just a daydream. But an intriguing one.

The Built In Redundancy Of My Proposed Twitter Replacement Would Allow It To Scale

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now, I’m well aware of the failed Google social media platform G+ and its concept of Circles. While it was a strong idea, it was really difficult for the average person to understand what the fuck a Circle was and how to practically use it. Meanwhile, there are also Reddit “reddits” and “subreddits” which are pretty much a ham-handed application of the Usenet newsgroup concept of yore.

But my Group concept is pretty easy to understand and it’s also feature rich and flexible. One thing that makes the Group concept really scalable is its redundancy. Each user could great as many public or private Groups as they wished about any subject with any name. They would also be able to manage who posted to any individual Group, which would also mitigate the risk that any specific group would grow too huge and unmanageable.

So, if there was some breaking news, there might be a dozen or more really good Groups devoted to the event where well known content creators from journalism would post full page posts on the subject that would create threads that people with the right posting rights could comment on via inline editing. Many more people could simply read these discussions without being able to post.

All these features would fix some of the horrific flaws in Twitter at the moment. You wouldn’t be limited to just 280 characters. You wouldn’t struggle to find good content and you wouldn’t feel like you were being overwhelmed with a torrent of content.

I think this is a far better mouse trap than Twitter at the moment. And I only bring this up because Elon Musk is so mercurial that he could very well kill the goose the lays the golden egg and there will be a window of opportunity for some spunky, aggressive startup to swoop in and eat Musk’s lunch. But it’s a very narrow window — it’s not like there’s any interest in social media anymore in Silicon Valley.

You would have to have some vision, some willingness to throw money at a problem that most people believe has already been solved. But, of course, it hasn’t — at least not very well. Twitter was just lucky. And it, seems, it’s luck may be about to run out.

My Proposed Twitter Replacement Is Very Flexible

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Again, I have to stress that I just want to use this idea I’ve come up with — I have no skin in the game otherwise besides wanting credit for thinking it up. I can’t code and don’t have any money. So, lulz, have at it. But with that out of the way, I will note that there is more than one way to look at this Twitter replacement concept.

Instead of a direct Twitter replacement, you might use the concept to go after newspapers as an app. You would have the main domain name and then a subdomain for individual cities that you were going to cover. Each of the your editors would have a number of Groups under their control and their writers would post to the Groups and there could be discussions about whatever it is they posted.

So, instead of the passive user base of a print newspaper, you would have a very active audience that felt engaged in what the “virtual newspaper” was putting out during the course of the day. This is very Blue Sky and just something I’ve thought would be an interesting application.

Also, if you really wanted to be ambitious, this cherry picking of Usenet UX concepts could be used to go after Facebook. You do it this way — start the service as a Twitter replacement then gradually add features so it’s a direct Facebook replacement. Doing so, of course, would mean Facebook would either want to buy you or crush you before it was all over with. Or, if nothing else, clone all your features.

But I really do like the idea that the fundimental problem of how currently the various elements of your life are all smashed together in a very weird and awkward situation. The Group concept fixes this problem because everything about the service would be based on Groups. By definition, to use the service would be to have different interests, subjects, elements of your life all in a different Group devoted to them.

Anyway, lulz. This is really fun to write about, even if it’s completely pointless and no one cares.

A Neat Element Of My Proposed Twitter Replacement — Inline WYSIWYG Editing Of Webpages Posted To The Platform

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of the strongest parts of Usenet was you had an entire page to work with when you wanted to post something to the platform. Essentially, you wrote an email that was copied and distributed across the public UUCP network. This element would ultimately cause the decline and fall of Usenet because, lulz, it just could not scale.

Spam and porn became so bad with Usenet that it just faded away into the oblivion that in now exists in.

But the Twitter replacement I daydream about would harken back to those Usenet days of having a full page Post. What’s so interesting about this is if you update the Usenet post into the Web world on a single dedicated Website instead of a distributed network, you have a huge amount of potential.

One thing that I find fanciating is imagine, say, The New York Times pushing its formatted content into the system and individual users were given the ability to inline edit that content in a threaded discussion. Instead of just seeing the headline of a New York Times article and a blurb, you could see — and edit — the entire article in a threaded discussion.

And, what’s more, you could give the average user the ability to create a mulit-media, formated full-page post themselves that they could post to the system in a Group. I think that’s really cool. And given that you’re dealing with a fullpage post, there is at least the possibility that you could have some sort of Zoom-like video conferencing in that Post as well that people could comment under in real time.

I fear, of course, that I’m getting ahead of myself. I would suggest anyone who might take me up on this concept to probably keep things simple at first before getting to elaborate. You would have to ease people into a whole different way of looking at content creation.

The ‘Feed’ of My Imagined Twitter Replacement

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Again, I only write about this pointless mental exercise because there is, in fact, a window of opportunity for a tech startup to swoop in and replace Twitter if Elon Musk manages to force his new acquisition’s implosion. I have six novels to work on and I should throw myself into that instead of daydreaming about shit like this. It’s finally really gotten into my thick skull that no one is going to listen to me about this idea if I can’t code or have the resources to pay someone to make this a reality.

But my hope is that someone, somewhere might read this and run with the idea. I’d prefer to simply get some credit for having thought up the idea, but other than than that, lulz. I know how the real world works.

Anyway, let’s talk about how the “Feed” of this Twitter replacement would work, given that instead of Tweets you would have full page, graphic rich Webpages you would interact with instead. This would take even the Facebook concept of the status up date to the next level.

Here’s my solution to this situation — you would “subscribe” to individual Threads within Groups that you’ve subscribed to and whenever there was a new Post that Thread you would see in it in your timeline, like you might otherwise see a new tweet. But you wouldn’t see the whole post, but rather just its subject and the first 100 words or whatever. Something manageable.

When you click on the subject of the Post, you see the whole thing in the context of the overall Thread and Group that it’s in. This solves one issue with the Group feature that is a hold over from Usenet newsgroups — newsgroups were notoriously parochial and unwieldy. That’s why back in the day, any popular Usenet newsgroup had to have a FAQ to stop people from asking the same questions over and over again when they joined the group for the first time.

One tricky problem is how to solve the “Hello” issue. Inevitably, new people to any service will want to say “hello” just to make sure someone can see what they’re tweeting. This was a real problem with Usenet newsgroups — especially during after AOL gave the broader public access to Usenet in I think 1993. It got so bad that there was a specific group devoted to people simply saying “Hello” — alt.hello.

I think the solution would be to address this issue through a combination of the onboarding process and maybe giving people a productive way to say hello in a Group set to Personal that only their friends would see. Or something.

I’m well aware that all of this a lot more complicated than the average Twitter user might be accustomed to AND if this proposed service grew popular enough that Facebook would either want to buy it or crush it because it would be easy, through mission creep, to turn this proposed service into something more akin to Facebook than Twitter.

Anyway, absolutely no one listens to me. But it feels good to get this off my chest.

The Power of The ‘Group’ Feature of My Imagined Twitter Replacement

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Even though I’m very tired of thinking about this idea because it’s just never going to happen for various reasons, I feel like letting off a little steam and writing about it some again. The key element of my proposed Twitter replacement is the Group feature.

This would be a lot easier to understand than G+’s “Circles” because it’s implementation would be pretty much just a more modern, more flexible incarnation of a Usenet newsgroup from 25-odd years ago. The key interesting part of the Group feature would be everyone could create a one for any reason for any subject.

So, imagine there’s a big breaking news story. With Twitter, you generally have to be following the right people — journalists, etc — to know what’s going on moment by moment. And, even then, what you get is a flood of information that is difficult to process because there’s no rhyme or reason to it all.

But with my imagined service, you would have two options in the breaking news use case. One would be, you could follow the user and the other would be you could follow just their Groups you were interested in. As such, you would get notifications whenever a user you followed created a new Group and you could opt-in to joining a group you found interesting. Meanwhile, you could also use a discovery feature to find Groups with a subject of interest to you as well.

And, remember, because of the redundancy involved with the service, it’s a lot less likely that a Group will grow so huge as to be unwieldly. And, if you really wanted to manage the size of any particular Group, you might even give the owner of the Group some basic administrative abilities like controlling who can post.

This brings up one potential flaw in the Group idea — management of groups might grow overwhelming and cumbersome. Most people don’t have the time, interest or energy to use granular administrative tools for a Group if they have dozens of Groups to oversee.

There are two solutions to this.

One would be your more popular accounts would probably already have a social media management team that could handle all of that. The other solution is you could have some sort of universal application feature that would set the permissions of all your groups and you could change it for an individual group as necessary.

Remember, the only reason why I even mention any of this is Twitter is in trouble and, as such, there is a window of opportunity for someone, anyone to swoop in and fill that technological and social space with something new and better.

But, in general, it’s a very limited window and you would have to have a lot of spunk and vision to pull it off because, lulz, all the momentum is in Web3 and AI.

Ok, You Have Me Figured Out, Tik-Tok…But How?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I continue to be amazed by Tik-Tok’s ability to figure me out to a very, very specific degree. I’ve written about this phenomena repeatedly — even going so far as to suggest Tik-Tok can read my mind in some way — but let’s talk about the latest version of this, which I think might be explainable without any strange, kooky ideas.

Jane Birkin

A long time ago, I had brief, intense celebrity crush on fashion It Girl, Alexa Chung. Now, what’s so weird about this is for some time I’ve been pushed videos of Jane Birkin (who Ms. Chung looks up to a lot) as well as her daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg.

I find all of this kind of weird. I find it weird because I started getting pushed videos about Birkin and Gainsbourg pretty much out of the blue. But I will admit that once I was pushed the videos that I lingered on them and liked them, which could explain why I also got videos of Chung pushed my way as well. Maybe? Anything to explain what’s going on rather than to suggest digital telepathy. What about what I was looking and liking on Tik-Tok could possibly have narrowed down what the service knows about me down to my interest in Chung and, by extension, Birkin and Gainsbourg?

It’s all very strange. Spooky even.

I don’t think Tik-Tok can read our minds — even though it definitely seems like it at times, but….the mystery of algorithms remains very eerie.

The Vision Thing: My Personal Pitch For A Twitter Replacement

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I only bring this up because it definitely seems as though Twitter is going to crash and burn pretty soon, now that we have learned that Elon Musk wants to cut 75% of its staff.

I’ll try to be as brief as possible, I’ve wasted too much energy on this fantasm already.

The point of this Twitter replacement would be to bring back, to modernize the best bits of the old Usenet newsgroups. Now, I’m WELL AWARE that Reddit serves the function of Usenet in the modern age. Ok, I get it. But the idea that I have would be to be a far more feature rich and nuanced interpretation of Usenet.

What makes Twitter so engaging? That’s the key issue when thinking about how you might build a better version of it. One element of its success is how simple it is — there’s no onboarding to the service and you can really just jump right in without having to read any additional documentation like a FAQ. The service’s simplicity combined with having zero learning curve is what has given it whatever success it’s found to date.

The idea I have is a far more simplistic version of the “circles” concept that G+ had back in the day. Instead of a Circle, you would have a Group. And these Groups would be setup in such a way that the concept would be a lot easier to understand than G+’s Circles. They would be setup a lot more like Usenet Newsgroups with discussions and threads. You would have Threads inside of a Group made up of full pages posts.

This concept is exactly what we had back in the day with Usenet newsgroups and very similar — but not exactly — like Reddit. I haven’t used Reddit in a long time, but it’s my impression that you have one post and then threaded discussions below that central post — but it’s more of a comment section instead of a full page Post like we had back in the day with Usenet.

Anyway, the point is, as part of the onboarding process, you would have to setup your own Groups — with whatever names you liked — and you would have the option of joining other people’s Groups as well. And, remember, you could create as many Groups as you like about whatever subject you liked, no matter how specific or personal.

This redundancy would allow the service to scale in ways that neither Usenet nor Reddit can. This redundancy would would, in essence, give you a sense of a “super Twitter account” in the sense that you could have ad hoc Groups by different reporters and writers devoted to the same news event — breaking or otherwise.

I could go on and on — and I have on my Instagram account (SheltonBumgarner.) You can see me, over the course of way, way too many Instagram videos flesh out this concept pretty well. I’m embarrassed by how many videos I did on this subject over the years.

No one is ever going to take me up on this idea, of course. That’s just not how things work. But I really love the concept.