Very Meta: I wasn't Writing what I Thought I was Writing
The Writing
Now that all the chores are done, I am spending this fine afternoon writing. I was planning on drafting a preamble to an "Alternatives" series I am working on for the near future. The piece started out as "why should we even look for alternatives to billionaire-owned 'social media' in the first place?"
... and then I realized that what I was actually writing was a piece on the links between, and the self-reinforcing loop, involving:
- đ§ the psychology of content sharing - specifically the role of high arousal and intense emotions;
- đŠ the enshittification of once-social media into algorithmic content-pushing machines, their goal no longer being the facilitation of communication between humans, but to keep eyeballs on the platform for as long as possible;
- đī¸ and how each of these separately feed off each other, and create an ever-reinforcing and self-sustaining loop.
I am finding lots of great research out there - so stay tuned, I guess? đ¤
The Thinking About the Writing
On a meta level, this has been an interesting experience. In preparation for the "Alternatives" series I am planning (it's going to do what it says on the tin - suggesting more privacy-friendly, less centralized, less billionaire-owned alternatives to common platforms and tools), I was drafting (well, I thought I was drafting) a preamble outlining why we might want to be looking for alternatives in the first place.
For a lot of us in the privacy, decentralization, and interop spaces, this is obvious. However! It may not be as obvious to all of the three billion monthly active facebook users. So let's start there.
I am hoping that the series can be of interest to those of us who have been reading blog posts, articles, hanging out in the mastodon spaces, and listening to the podcasts for years; but that they can also (and I think I am thinking of this as its primary purpose) be shared with folks who have been meaning to quit facebook, meaning to delete their twitter, but have never quite had enough oomph for it - or they're finding it too difficult, and don't know why that is the case, and whether they're weird for finding this difficult (they're not; it is hard).
Anyway. Back to the writing.
I was writing... and writing... and... the post got longer and longer, eventually approaching novella length, and I thought, something isn't right here. So I took a step back, and after a while, realized that what I was writing about wasn't what I was actually writing about.
As this blog is meant as a space for me to write about things that actually, genuinely interest me, and share those interests with others, I figured: To heck with it. This post is going to get split into two, and we're starting with the psychology of it all, and how the algorithms piggyback and benefit off of it. So now we're here, and the "Alternatives" series may end up having two preambles.
The end (and the beginning).
