The End of the Social Graph: How the Interest Graph Changes the Game –For Now

Thanks for writing this up OP -- I appreciate you giving me this data.

I'm interested in how the pivot to Mastadon will change things in the social networking space.

I still remember griping years back during a bug report Facebook was letting people I didn't intend to see I'd "liked" Dan Savage.

It's lonely out there for those of us who "enjoy crushing bastards"[0] but also truly value the idea of informed consent.

I deleted my Facebook entirely in 2016, partly because of things like conflating interests and people.

Let's make no mistakes: Facebook was, was at it's core, a website freshmen use to see who's single. I once famously pusudoanonymously joked on Kashmir Hill's old Forbes blog that "Mark Zuckerberg has the consent model of a fraternity brother -- he thinks if you don't opt out, he can do whatever he wants."

Facebook, like any other social network, is made of people.

It's a mulipolar world now -- Metcalfe's Law[1] remains a thing.

Back in 2016 when I joked in Vegas that I was putting the "ugh" in "thought leader", I was surprised how many blue checks would follow me after that change but get aggrieved when I'd DM them -- a lot of social networking seems weirdly performative, in a way that only benefits old school media personalities who are very metrics focused rather than folks valuing authentic communications and knowledge discovery.

For example, I once had an aspiring journalist hijack the language used by domestic violence researchers when I chastised her for being a cyber Zoe Barnes[2] -- purposefully avoiding using the best possible source protection, since she'd rather her sources get burned than her rivals be able to maintain her level of access when someone changes who they speak to and recites how they contacted her.

To conflate a desire to not interact with someone annoying or a rival with someone who's abusive, especially if paired with perverting the idea of OSINT is... really something special.

To this day, I have never gotten a good explanation on how anthropologists handle situations in the cyber realm where vulnerable people are at risk -- I got the impression that they simply don't, often paired with spinning up their own nyms to "touch the poop", as the 4chan types like to phrase it.)

Anyways, sorry for the wall of text, but it's been a long time since the Arab Spring. Now is not the time for slacktivism, it's time for Perestroika[3], time to take things offline, and time to stop being obsessed with looking at graphs and figures while forgetting that testimony is a form evidence.

(At least I, the chicken fingers loving autist... care. A sociopath would let london bridge fall down.)

I'm off to have another cup of tea... cheers!!

[0] https://espresso.repubblica.it/internazionale/2015/04/02/new... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law#Network_effec... [2] https://houseofcards.fandom.com/wiki/Zoe_Barnesx [3] https://archive.ph/20150409122734/http://in.rbth.com/opinion...