The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

One thing I’ve noticed is that the culture on Twitter now is quite different than it was a decade ago, and the platform has calcified. A decade ago the common adivce for how to connect with people - Tweet often, comment often, follow accounts - connected you with a lot of people, and you would often end up following each other.

I started a new account recently (hadn’t used my old one in years), and doing so now got me just about zero attention. I got zero followers from comments, posts I made, following others, etc. It was like shouting in an empty room. Of course, there were ways to “increase engagement” that I tried and they did increase my follower account - but to what end? At that point it just feels like a weird game where everyone is trying to scam each other.

I tried another social media app recently, and was surprised to find it was like how Twitter used to be. When I followed people, a bunch of people followed me back. A bunch of people reached out to me, so that even though I haven’t put _any_ effort into engagement so far, I’ve made a lot of connections. People there are one social media to be, well, social. On Twitter, it feels like a mercenary game of “What can this person do for me?”/“How can I trick this person into making them think I’ll make them rich/healthy/wealthy/successful.”

One thing I've realized about social media, especially X/Twitter, is that it's not a singular place, that is you can have 4 feeds on twitter from different users that might as well be different social media platforms.

I've noticed if you follow the "Indie Hackers" on X then you will get lots of self promotion (ie. "My startup just hit $X/MRR!!, here's how I did it: substack.com...."). On the other hand there are other places like "Finance X" or "Sports X" where you get deep dives about the state of that space from various people.

Moving away from X/Twitter, there's tons of "authentic" content you can find on Youtube, a recent favorite of mine has been watching Peter Santenello[1]. He could be considered a journalist and his whole thing is just going into random communities and talking to people. I especially enjoyed his series about Appalachia and the Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@PeterSantenello

Some thoughts:

> Megathreads about AI, thoughtful, longform narratives that could have been blog posts...

Honestly, the long form tweets became a signal to just ignore that tweet. I unfollow or block users that tweet long form often.

> The people in my feed—most of whom I’m not following, by the way—

Yea, just use the chrono-tab ("following"). Only usable version of Twitter.

> love posting for engagement. Some of them love it so much that they offer courses teaching other people how to do it—which amplifies this godforsaken death spiral even further.

This is so bizarre to watch.

---

I think Twitter is usable only if you stick to the chronological tab which has only your follows and putting non-trivial effort to clean your follows periodically. Unfollow and block people aggressively. Outrage-focused account? Blocked. Grift? Unfollow/block. Random-ass comment pushing some political angle? Block. I block even people that don't share follows if I got to see a tweet I just don't like.

Social media generates a lot of waste, and good platforms provide a way for you to remove the waste from your experience. Otherwise, the end state of these types of networks is LinkedIn: a useful tool hidden beneath the massive pile of social media waste.

Even ChatGPT can generate generic LinkedIn grift: https://chat.openai.com/share/3585085b-5407-4d48-b6e3-12d3cb...

> Elon’s political antics chased away a lot of good people. Many of my favorite follows have moved to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. Also, more and more people are waking up and realizing that social media is actually quite bad for you, and leaving it behind. Good for them. Bad for me.

It's common to blame the move from Twitter on Elon's politics. And that's perfectly valid. I moved away for a much simpler reason. He killed Tweetdeck for anyone not willing to pay $8/month. Regular Twitter hits you with ads (very disruptively), related tweets they know you want to see, and an algorithm that tries to get you hooked on hits of toxicity. Mastodon is pretty close to what I had with Tweetdeck, but less toxic due to lack of quote tweets.

Edit: Rereading this comment, I want to add that the things the author is saying make Twitter bad were to a large extent things we didn't have to deal with when we had Tweetdeck. That's not clear in the original version of my comment.

You don't have to wait long until the next story comes out about some famous person who commits suicide or hits rock bottom in some other way. The average person thinks 'why would they do that when they have so many friends?'.

The reality is that even though they might have thousands (or millions) who know their name or will act really excited to see them at their next cocktail party; they have no one to turn to in their real moment of need. They simply don't have deep, long lasting relationships with people who genuinely care about them. They are surrounded by 'suck-ups' who will tell them what they want to hear instead of having a real conversation with meaningful content. When they are in real trouble, all those 'friends' will abandon them at the drop of a hat.

The online world mimics that situation very well.

People aren't authentic when they are talking to everyone on the planet at once, unless they are incredibly naive. They are authentic talking to their friends, or family, in private conversations. A lot of people were naive in the early days and it made for amusing conversation, not any longer and these platforms are just about brand management / advertising now.

"Authenticity in an Attention Economy"

Is that anything like Authenticity in an Advertising Economy?

I have to admit, I've never really understood (or used) Twitter/X. Short form posts lacking depth but very, very timely? The only time I used it very much was early on when I was living in Boston and it was useful to find out if there were subway outages. Lacking depth, timely, but pointedly useful. Somehow that function stopped working after a while. I've no idea why.

I suspect I simply don't understand Twitting. I've never figured it out. Facebook and Youtube figured _me_ out, and they both provide stuff I'm actually interested in. (And yes, I find it mildly disturbing as I use something that I don't really control or understand. But FB and YT actually do work.)

Twitter/X despite several attempts on my part to play its game, simply has never produced much attention or engagement for me.

Hell, I've gotten more use from Instagram than Twitter. Though not much.

For what it's worth, I'm older, in my mid 60s. I do note that FB tends to skew older. Or at least my FB experience does. Possibly an artifact of it's algorithm. But when I click on it's recommendations for "friends" I find the older users active and the younger users accounts a ghost town.

My suspicion is that the changes we are seeing in how social media works with people, especially people of different ages, is a kind of societal immune response. To hark back to my initial reaction to this post, advertising has certainly evolved, and evolved its audience over the last century. It's still here, and still pretty deeply embedded. But what it does and how it does it has changed. Insert your own viral analogy here...

Just abandon these products, they are useless and I think we have all seen enough evidence to suggest they do more harm than good.

Dont start splitting hairs here either, I understand and was there when Twitter was the only way to communicate when governments were putting down protests... There are other tools. Go out there and build them... I wont ever touch a spycloud again while protesting...

Same reason why Wikipedia contributors do not want to be paid, and why cryptocurrency-based wikis failed.

Money is not always the best incentive. It is leaking in every part of our society, sometimes in a destructive way. It's great for innovation and infrastructure, but not for our social life and human rights.

PJ Vogt (formerly Reply All) recently did an interesting episode on his new podcast about this exact topic[0]. It's worth a listen. It really helped to clarify some meta-thoughts about how attention works, how media consumption influences us, and how I think about Twitter (and people's relation to it).

Like, at one point, PJ talks about how he's witnessed people at the bar talking to a friend (purportedly), but in a format that seems to be talking to an imaginary twitter audience. The way people talk, communicate, quip, etc on twitter is bleeding into discourse OUTSIDE twitter. I tend to agree as I've seen this. Worse, when I use things like twitter, I find myself being unintentionally obtuse, contrarian, quippy, etc.

You are a product of what you consume. How deep of thoughts can be conveyed in 140/280 characters? And perhaps more importantly: does such a shallow medium give you a proper opportunity to explore your thoughts on a topic before you begin to formulate an opinion/response?

[0] https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/how-do-i-use-the-internet-now

I'm happy the author is finally realizing that twitter is not the world, and endless self-promotion isn't the only way to live.

Authenticity and commerce are awkward bedfellows. Just take a look at corporate communications where complete vacuity and obfuscation is the status-quo, way before social media.

The main new thing is virality and actors trying to ride platform algorithms. This has led to a complex three-body system (producers-platform-consumers) the full degenerating dynamics of which we are only gradually discovering.

There must be better ways but they are still to materialize. The fediverse is super cool but that's mostly because it has not yet attracted the crushing attention of commerce.

Would any of the old classics (take your pick from Aristotle to Tolstoy) have been created in a data-driven world? What those authors put out into the world (I think), was what they thought was missing in the world, not what they thought the world wanted to hear. This is getting very hard to do today, even when you're honestly trying to do so, because the data is constantly telling you not to. And the data is necessarily short term an one dimensional, never fully capturing value in the way that our brains organically do.

I'm more annoyed by this in blogs. Substack started as an anti-Twitter, with long-form intentional communication and calm newsletters. Now, it's slowly shifted to a growth hacker cesspool of pop-ups, recommendations, and dark UI patterns. Beehiv is worse. We've ended up with an explosion of content blogs by people who don't value content.

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Is it slow though? It seems to be going at neck-breaking speed.

> My feed is full of posts that have obviously had more effort put into it than most of what I used to see. Megathreads about AI, thoughtful, longform narratives that could have been blog posts, carefully curated images, and super-positive business updates. It’s mostly engaging stuff.

I think that simply, it is NOT an engaging stuff. That is why author is bored by it. It is content author think "should" be engaging. Seriously, following two are pretty much opposite of engaging: carefully curated images, and super-positive business updates.

These two are definition of the boring. And while the long form narratives have potential to be engaging, just being long form does not make the thing engaging. The content actually have to be engaging.

This article shoots itself in the foot right at the start. It reveals that the author is in fact just as wrapped up in Twitter as those he critiques. It shows a graph with a person on the left who has "nothing to say" being a mongrel, as if it's bad not to want to insert or even have a personal opinion about everything. There is completely nothing wrong with not getting wrapped up in the BS that is modern western society at large. In fact, it's quite healthy NOT to have an opinion about any of it because you're off doing much better, much healthier things.

One of The Last Psychiatrist's points is that there's no such thing as 'authentic'. From his blog post "How to destroy a marriage (2009)"[1]:

"I know, it's hard to keep those emotions in check after your boss has been riding you all day. Yet then the UPS guy comes to the door and you are instantly nice, bright, warm. "Hey, thanks, have a good one buddy! Go Raiders!" You'll say it's an act, but the other way of looking at it is that you think it's worth faking politeness to the UPS guy, but not to your family. See? Does your family need to see the real, irritable you?"

"Oh, I hear you, my special, special, generation, the one that counts hypocrisy the greatest of all possible sins: "if I can't be myself at home, what's the point?" Because that isn't the real you, there isn't a you. Who you are is what you do. If you come home and are cranky and curt and bossy at home, then you are a jerk. You don't get to say, "I'm a nice person, but I just happen to be irritable every day." Even if you aren't a jerk, what your family sees is a jerk."

[1] https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/04/how_to_destroy_a_mar...

My opinion, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, is that Twitter changing its prompt, in 2009, from the ‘small’ “What are you doing?” to the ‘big’ “What’s happening?” sowed the seeds of its change from the authentic and personal thing it was, to the katamari of sound and fury it is now.

I used to follow quality people posting meaningful stuff. They disappeared. Why? No blue check.

Meanwhile I had to ban the Primerian or whatever the fuck that is because I got his every tweets, responses and memes shoved in my face and I never followed him.

Every tweet is another "10 fact you didn't care about that will shock you" with a thread emoji like I should care.

The whole thing is just disgusting now.

The use of the words "Attention Economy" is what I personally call the pablumization of a problem.

If we want to address the problem we need to use the correct term: clickbait economy. The internet as we know it, is bought and paid for by clicks. And the way to get more clicks has nothing to do with authenticity. Just the opposite.

Which article would you click on to read - "More and more Americans sink into poverty"? - "Trump and Biden have food fight at restaurant?".

And Twitter takes this even further. `if isdemocrat title = "trump throws food at biden?" if isrepublican title = "biden throws food at trump?" if istrump title = "lock em up"

It is actually worse than that, because the clicks are then used to sell you a bill of goods. How you should hate 'xyz'. How you should spend $10,000 for a new desk chair. Or how you need a $1000 a month obesity drug to fix the fact that you have been eating clickbait food?

Tracking ads are toxic. They threaten our personal well being and the well being of our society. They are right up there with air pollution.

Oh wait, no one will want to think about those issues, so why post this comment?

Twitter? Try going out to dinner without your phone. It goes way deeper than any single social platform. The way we relate to technology has become so weird.

It was clear when IG made this cutover ~5 years back. It was a fun platform for photographers to share work and make connections with random people throughout the world I'd never know. I even met a few IG friends IRL while traveling oversees.

Slowly with the algorithmic feed and influencers, it became fairly hard to "reach" the people who had organically followed me, or to see the photos of the people I organically followed. Became less of an outlet for my hobby and more of a chore.

Was interesting seeing my "follower" numbers double or triple while my "engagement" numbers went down 90%. Eventually was just family/friends I knew pre-IG, plus random bots.

Seems like the curve of all social media platforms as they monetize & popularize.

Everything boils down to incentives. The idea that people are paid to grab attention is flawed. It has created a cyclone of everyone chasing what's hot while true creators, not the namesake, but people who actually create new stuff, are spun out to the farthest reaches.

Like most things in life. The very best ideas and things are hidden. In someways that's good, but not if those people suffer in silence. If a great work is never read nor seen, is it great?

Advertising, specifically adtech has destroyed the world. It perverted every media and medium. I watch with great anticipation of its impending reversal. We will find ourselves back at a contextual and demographic association sooner than most know.

Maybe this is my own neurospice speaking but...What even is authenticity? Do we even see authenticity in public? Any awareness that we are being observed introduces some amount of Hawthorne effect. Probably the most genuine folks are the introverts and socially averse.

Regional burns are espoused to celebrate "radical self-expression" , and unlike the Big Burn, their smaller size seems to promote authenticity to a greater degree. But even there, people are doing bits or acting out a persona or even just socially experimenting.

Authenticity itself is nebulous. But even taking that into account, there are definitely more harmful and less harmful facades. We pay actors and performers to be inauthentic. But we consider influencer "fake".

Point is, I don't think "authenticity" is the main metric we actually care about. Inauthenticity can be lots of fun for all parties. It's the motivations of the act. It's the second-order authenticity. An actor is authentic in their inauthenticity: there's no hiding that they are putting on an act. But we dislike influencers and the like because while they are (often obviously) inauthentic, they try to hide that fact under a facade trying to make it seem like it's their "real expression".

As a counterpoint, take a youtuber I really enjoy, Ryan McBeth. He does OSINT mostly military-themed current events vids and blogs. I'm sure the Ryan in front of the camera is different than the Ryan I'd meet at the bar: more polished, calculated in choice of words, presenting self in the best light, because that's what we all do in the limelight. But he totally lampshades his sponsored bits: "let me take a few moments to pay the bills". That's the second-order authenticity. Doing a paid sponsor bit is ipso facto inauthentic - it's not something you'd do without the influence of money. But lampshading it tips his hand and humanizes him. Or does it? <vsauce theme> Maybe he's saying that because his shtick is "down to earth authentic guy" and that's what that character would say? (I doubt it, but it's a fun hypothetical).

Famously, "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players" - Shakespeare

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

https://ryanmcbeth.substack.com/

What is not really mentioend is that authenticity is not really guaranteed unless you know the people well, from irl meetings following them for a long time (i.e interviews). It´s very hard to find a single source of a platform for "authentic" content or connections. One day a person you know might post something insightful the other time it´s a marketing LinkedIn how to xxxx.

Twitter is not as authentic as it used to be but I think this happens to any platform. Look at facebook.

Something on my mind is how to build a non-toxic engagement model and I am finally getting a clear picture of how to do it.

You can make a pretty good engagement model for Hacker News based on headlines by filtering for posts with > 10 votes and predicting the ratio of comments to votes. The trouble is that "high engagement" posts are frequently clickbait.

I suspect that the trending toots on mastodon.social right now are about a person who got elected to the Speaker of the House who I'd like to call a "clown" but that would be an insult to clowns so I won't. If a trained a model to maximize boosts and favorites I'd create a monster (e.g. if the US was truly a "democracy" today we'd write a constitution enshrining a one-party state, the only disagreement is which party it would be) I know though that I get really good engagements on (low-effort) pictures of flowers that I post as opposed to the sports photos I take which I work really hard at it. That is, there are paths to high engagement that aren't toxic, a model just has to be trained to reward them.

In either case it would take developing a training set of a few thousand non-toxic but high engagement posts, it's probably easier to do that for HN than it is to do it for Mastodon.

I just follow people I know or who I want to listen to. And it's been fine. If you use the For You tab, you have to be prepared to mute.

I also mute war related stuff.

Someone else mentioned about the differences between different categories of content on Twitter and I agree. Mainly, I like Twitter for sports. I have not experienced another platform that gives me this type of interactions with writers, show hosts, players, and other fans. I find Twitter for political stuff to be pretty bad. It's kind of amusing but that no matter how irrational and unhinged sports fans are in the U.S., they aren't as bad as what I see on political Twitter posts. :) I barely follow any tech/startup stuff on Twitter anymore. I'm not sure why, I guess the content just wasn't engaging to me. A side note, I've also bailed on IndieHackers as it seems to have changed (in my opinion) with regards to the type of content that made it cool in the beginning to whatever is going on there now. I guess IH is starting to experience this evolution in content that the author is talking about.

I still read HN though! HN has the most insightful and thoughtful comments/discussions and cause doom scrolling.

I think by now the most efficient social media would be an endless doom scroll with sub 5 second videos that the viewer gets to like or dislike to train the algorithm.

No thinking, just flashing lights straight into the brain.

I'm sure this is what the kids will be watching in 2-10 years. Total mindless entertainment. I'd develop it myself and get rich, if I didn't have a conscience.

Previously I objected to Musk's "Town Square" idea:

>The whole feed based "internet town square" concept is flawed, if anyone have seen an actual European town square you would have noticed that it's nothing like Twitter or similar. In a good town square, you have people minding their own business and the public activities are actually curated(a few agendas that fit in the physical location) and people visit those if they they are interested in.

However, maybe it is a town square but a bad one. Bad town squares are places where everyone tries to sell you something or make you do something and there are plenty of crazy people trying to grab attention and do things you would rather not see.

My "for you" tab is filled with "ChatGPT is great but you are not using it right" posts that look like copycats, the only organic looking content is from anti-vaxxers and all kind of conspiracy theorists and fascist(maybe because ChatGPT refuses to generate such content, therefore the only organic content is that one). Oh an that is organic but not really authentic, that is it is not independent thinkers but solders of a cult or a movement that keep repeating same talking points.

On the other hand, Twitter has become a better product overall thanks to making some stuff like lists more prominent so you have some tools to avoid the crazy town. However, the problem is that even the curated lists are not immune because now the people in those lists are incentivised to grab as much as attention as possible so they can monetise it. Thece are courses and tools made to optimize for that so the content becomes "made for Twitter to boost engagement". Youtube also has it but maybe of the higher production costs and longer to consume content format, a race to the bottom hasn't happen as dramatically. They still can get good engagement by creating higher quality videos.

So what about actual people who don't produce content professionally? The actual authentic content? The authentic discussions are happening in groups of people who know each other(online or offline), that is WhatsApp/Telegram or other channels that allow small groups interact privately.

To me, the problems with Twitter were never complicated. The thing Twitter wants you to do with it is not good: it wants you to pay constant attention to a stream of short messages. Occasionally the messages are funny, sometimes they are even insightful, but they are always short and there is never and end to them. I could never imagine how that would make me smarter, wiser, or better informed. I could see how it would help me waste a lot of time, sure. But even if Twitter succeeds beyond their wildest expectations and nothing ever happens that was not exactly according to plan, it still leaves the world a worse place. If you think something makes the world a worse place, my advice is don't do it.

Easy band-aid: hide all blue check-mark people. It filters out exactly those running twitter as a business.

It will also revive the comments (because checkmarks float to the top and now you quickly scroll past them)

I wrote a userscript that does this https://pastebin.com/hfw8eQcf

It highlights and optionally collapses "seen" (scrolled past) and "blue checkmark" tweets. If you don't want the seen thing I could patch that out for you.

looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/o68inWp.png

If you really want to fix your Twitter/YouTube addiction the easiest way I've found to do it is unfollow/unsubscribe/unlike everything, turn off watch history, & install plugins like Control Panel for Twitter and Unhook for YouTube.

Social media is a lesson for all of us that sometimes the cost of something isn't readily apparent. It reminds me of Cowslip's Warren in Watership Down - apparently healthy and safe rabbits welcoming in others, with a mortal danger that isn't obvious and somewhat overlooked.

Thankfully we are at that stage with social (and other) media where Bigwig gets caught in a snare and narrowly escapes, and I can look around me and see my fellow people getting caught in these traps. For some people it is too late, for anyone who knows people who have gone too far down the youtube algorithm (like my mother) will know they aren't easily rescued.

I started a twitter a few months ago, and then deleted it after I realized the current meta is to say something extremely vapid and wrong to phish for annoyed engagement.

That is where we are at. Annoying people for follows.

I deleted it the next day.

Online culture is over. As people have improved at debating we have realized half the time you are shadow boxing with someone who doesn't even believe what they are saying. Or hell, anymore it could be a literal bot.

It is bad faith everywhere. It is all a waste of fucking time.

Not to mention the clear brigading and bot-nets on Reddit that makes arguing with the wrong person account suicide.

Just use the internet for what it was meant for: photos of cute animals.

I tweaked all my social media down from following thousands of people to following ~100 that I really know and love.

The result was amazing, a truly transformative social media experience.

I don't care about likes or comments, they are irrelevant to me, I just love seeing what people are up to, I comment and like when I mean it, and I often get to the end of the feed with no more scrolling to do.

I reduced my FB friends from around 3,700 a few years ago, followed by also removing liked pages and groups that no longer interested me or that I had liked out of politeness - and the lovely result of that led me to doing it elsewhere.

Best decison, no question of it.

Twitter isn't about people connecting, or even about advertisers and making money.

It's about controlling the national conversation. Anything noisy enough on twitter will be picked up by hungry media of all sorts, so a steady stream of disinformation can exhaust any real governance feedback cycle.

Elon bought Twitter so he could be a player in national elections.

(And the death of authenticity hasn't been particularly slow. It may be that people who sacrificed time and loyalty are blind to the possibility that it was a complete waste and a huge mistake to enable this.)

Always amazes me when someone realizes that Twitter is not the real world.

As for the "engaging content" the author describes, I dont find these engaging at all. Nothing is less engaging than a 34 tweet long thread, each tweet being a wall of 800 characters and the actual content reading like some regurgitate, quasi-AI generated platitude.

When you've reached a point where even big company millennial MBAs realize that Twitter is not real and that "likes" don't translate into sales, you can tell that we're at the end of the rope.

There's two ways to look at this problem.

One is that you're sacrificing something when you're not your authentic self.

The other is that communication is a two-way street, and people who invest the resources in finding their audience closer to where they are are making their audiences' lives easier, and the attention economy rewards them for that.

I note that most of the YouTube science educators I watch wear makeup, for example (unless they don't show their face at all). And they space their updates to make for a regular-ish pulse of content.

The most insightful piece of analysis I’ve ever seen was at Facebook, from the rockstars who were looking at Instagram for the first time — a couple of years after the acquisition, when it was time to apply some informed strategic thinking.

The graph was super simple but very powerful:

* On the x-axis, you had how many followers (or views) a poster had: me and my 5 followers would be on the left-most bucket, someone popular was in 50-100, 100-200, etc., until the fashion brands, footballers in the 1M+ bucket at the far right of the graph.

- The y-axis was the total number of views over a period.

So, if you tend to see friends posting, there would be a big lump at the left of the graph. If the platform were like traditional media, there would be a lump at the right. As things were, the lump was moving slowly towards the right.

The problem was not that footballers and models don’t make good content — they do. The problem is that if you see that, you don’t post. So, the overall amount of content posted was dropping. Why put your wonky cake next to Amaury Guichon sculpting a peacock with nothing but chocolate and edible paint?

I think there’s a big cultural difference there, one that Americans won’t instinctively appreciate. Of course, you want your cooking show to feature the best of the best, but to keep people engaged? Ask funny people to mess up and tease each other instead. “The Great British Bake-off” isn’t successful because the cakes are world-class. But have people who can riff for five minutes on penis-related puns because a cake looks like it should be blurred to appear on the BBC, and people behind their screen will spout their own joke like it’s a Reddit thread.

> The people in my feed—most of whom I’m not following

Every now and again Twitter switches me to the "For you" tab. I always immediately notice because there are like 5 BuzzFeed-esque tweets in a row from accounts I am not following. I switch back to the "Following" tab, which is still a simple chronological list of tweets from people I follow and Twitter is good again.

I can see why Twitter is losing users if it keeps showing people the algorithmic feed though.

Can empathize. I use the F word a lot in my Tweets because its my natural unfiltered voice but it got me shadow banned. Now that my Twitter growth is just atrophied I'll often find myself thinking about engagement and I hate it.

Anyway if anyone cares for raw unfiltered takes about AI and also hacky projects check out my profile :)

https://twitter.com/deepwhitman

It is interesting, I have almost the opposite experience as the author. I first signed up for twitter 8 years ago, but it never really interested me and I barely used it.

I started using it again around the time that Elon bought it, and I have found it to be both useful and entertaining, depending on what I'm looking for.

I'm very selective about who I follow, and I'm quick to unfollow, mute/block, etc any content that I don't want on my feed.

Yes, browsing twitter these days feels like walking into a toy store where you can buy anything in the store, but everything in it is sold in exchange for time/attention.

The main problem is just the for you feed. Usually I'll mostly get posts from people I know IRL, but browsing a bit down you just get all these viral posts that are super interesting, but I don't have the time/attention to devote into bringing those toys home.

I think Twitter is actually useful because it reveals what people are authentically thinking. If you ever want to stop hero worshiping someone, follow them on Twitter. You'll quickly lose all illusions about their "genius" or supposed expertise on things beyond their narrow sub-specialty, and realize they're a flawed human being like everyone else.

Here's a related Intercept article re: TwitX from today:

    https://theintercept.com/2023/10/27/elon-musk-twitter-purchase/

This recent PBS Frontline episode was also quite good:

    https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/elon-musks-twitter-takeover/

I'm not convinced there is less high quality, highly authentic content, there's a ton, but there just are no longer gate keepers or limiters and everything is mixed together. Instead of skipping past the tabloids at the grocery aisle, that stuff is alongside a brilliant essay in a youtube stream or next to a picture from your mom.

I prefer the blue pill, but know I "should" be taking the red pill for my career.

Regarding authenticity: it has been a social media goal and so on display everywhere for so much time now, that even if there is true authenticity, it has started to feel like marketing which is really sad.

I find 90% of social media interactions to be inauthentic. Communication in massive free-for-all groups is weird. It causes people to want to be right, win, or sell you on something. It’s funny that people would look got truth on divisive argument websites.

Saw this video yesterday about how the reality show Love Island got professionalized in the same way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8VqPxYM2tY

this phenomenon exists outside Twitter/X as well you know, Youtube is an example

Fiction is cheaper than reality. A lump of slop entitled "delicious sandwich" is cheaper than an actual delicious sandwich. Take away the slop and it's even cheaper.

It's a miracle of disruptive innovation.

I'm waiting for the day that people's thoughts on how things work on Twitter are about as relevant to their thoughts on how things work on Digg.

At current trajectory, that won't take long.

> And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content.

Maybe, maybe not. Without specifying what trait you're talking about, "better" is largely a meaningless term.

The same could be said of Airbnb or Etsy, where the original vision of individual, personal inventory was displaced by more profitable, professionally managed, mass produced entities.

This reminds me of how Hollywood can't make great films anymore because of test screenings. Authenticity is perceived as weirdness and gets filtered out.

I never understood why these services were sold as "social networking". They are just a more sophisticated form of advertising for the most part.

Whenever I see "X" (twitter) I think of the x in the corner of a window, for closing the window. Sometimes I even click the logo.

Surely this is unintentional.

Surprised the author limits this to Twitter and recent history. Social media has mostly been self promotion and virtue twerking for at least a decade.

Authenticity often doesn't scale because authenticity requires a history that is unvarnished and informed by actual events and cannot be coerced

The only social media I spend time on is Instagram and really IG is on the same level as 4chan in terms of how red pilled the comments section is.

What does authenticity mean here? It is an ideological term - meaning, no one will assert they are trying to be inauthentic.

A lot of time when I hear people complain about an "inauthentic experience" in social media, what they really mean is "no one really cares what I say". Personally, I've never seen the appeal of Twitter. It's always been incredibly niche, particularly if you exclude all the people who simply use it for notifications ("I'm now live!").

Here's what I think (normal) people are starting to figure out: a lot of tech companies like to hide behind the Algorithm Defense, which is "We don't curate, suppress or promote anything, it's all The Algorithm [tm]". Google has effectively used this defense for search ranking for decades now.

Thing is, people still decide what goes into that algorithm. You see this in post-Elon Twitter with what I like to call the Blue Check Reply Guys, annoying people who couldn't build an organic audience so pay $8 to be at the top of every reply with their inane drivel. You see this on Tiktok where just mentioning "Palestine", let alone using a related tag, (allegedly) reduces your audience.

People who think they're having an authentic experience on social media I think are fooling themselves and probably living in a bubble. Like probably everyone, they want validation. Twitter in particular is the platform for snark and spouting popular opinions.

I do not enjoy the default economic perspective that when it comes to artistic creation, capitalism will necessarily force all the worst possible negative incentives.

Least of all, if using Twitter as the example, for reasons I will return to.

The history of art and creation is filled to the brim with examples of creatives that refused to fold to the mold, to embrace the trends and incentives of the economy, and stuck to their convictions regardless of the monetary disincentives to do so.

YouTube and TikTok each have stereotypical extremes that gravitate for attention but each have brilliant, unique, relatively long-form (Hours+ on Youtube, 5-10 minutes on TikTok) content that is are basically the singular vision of one human sharing their perspective in a way that does not exist anywhere else. (I like many of you prefer to consume written word, but there is of course a lot to be said that seeing a person speak, and all their emotional intonation contributes something too).

It's hysterical to me that the stereotype for TikTok is still "teenagers dancing" or "gen z making funny faces", when for me it's Philosophers, Lawyers, Activists, Scientists, Technologists, Adventurers, all sharing their passions and perspectives in deep nuanced interesting looks into subjects I know nothing and everything about.

Twitter itself is interesting because this all used to be true about it too, and to a much more constrained way can still be found there. But by and large it was deliberately destroyed by Elon Musk, and the only "creators" that are left are ones that are absolutely there because they are salespeople selling themselves, or basically get rich schemes masquerading as tech content (NFTs -> Generative AI, but in general also a lot of "here's how i made money by selling a course on how to make money")

This very issue is why I haven't had a social media account in years. Even something as benign as posting here on HN entails editing to avoid downvotes.

While we all make necessary and unavoidable judgements, the explicit nature of being judged and acting as a judge on social media lends itself to being inauthentic and narcissistic.

Hans-Georg Moeller has an excellent YouTube channel called Carefree Wandering. There several very good episodes on authenticity and social media.

What if you chose to follow people who you enjoy following instead?

I call bullshit on "if you're authentic nobody will care". I've been blogging for over 20 years (not on Twitter, Heavens forbid) and never did any promotional stuff and I am fine with amount of engagement I get. If literally nobody would ever engage again, I'd probably still do it. I also read dozens of other blogs, which don't do promotions - somehow I found them. There are probably hundreds of more interesting ones I haven't found and never will - but such is life, you can't earn all the money, eat all the food or read all thd content. I suspect those who complain about it either are in a wrong business or let their ego get ahead of them.

Also, can we get people to stop to confuse whatever weird things happen on Twitter with all the internet and all the economy?

The sooner social media becomes unpopular the better.

I don’t understand how there is such an assumed 1 to 1 relationship with getting lots of followers and making lots of money. Where the fuck is the money coming from??

It is not only Elon Musk who is to blame for the decline of Twitter. After all, other social media platforms, such as YouTube, have long been using eye-catching content to generate revenue. Even before Musk's acquisition, Twitter was already engaging in monetization practices such as redirecting users to external sites, allowing influencers to post sponsored tweets, and inadequately moderating content.

> Some of them love it so much that they offer courses teaching other people how to do it—which amplifies this godforsaken death spiral even further.

Sounds like normal capitalism. Perhaps if the race to the bottom of capitalisms backside wasn't the goal, we'd have higher quality services.

“ And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. ”

What now? This is where the terms clickbait come from. Content gets more rage inducing to get more clicks thus more money while real journalism disappears behind paywalls.

A system that rewards people with attention will always encourage attention seeking behavior, and when incentivized will also inevitably generate professional attention seeking behavior. It’s not a new concept.

I really like the way Academia of Ideas presets the problem. Link at bottom.

> But a strange thing has occurred with the rise of social media: many people are reverting back to a mechanism of identity formation that resembles sincerity, a mechanism of identity formation which Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio in You and Your Profile, have termed profilicity. Like sincerity, profilicity is other-directed and reliant on the reactions of an audience. With sincerity one’s family and community are the audience that casts judgement on how sincerely, or properly, one plays the pre-determined roles. With profilicity the audience is a generalized peer group consisting of hundreds, thousands or even millions of social media users and this audience plays a somewhat different role than under sincerity: not only does the audience judge the identity one forms, but it also helps shape the very roles one strives to play. For profilicty entails creating profiles on social media through the selective display of pictures and other bits of information, or in a more passive manner merely observing the profiles of admired personalities, and then using these idealized profiles as roles to play in real life. Or as Jeremy Weissman explains in The Crowdsourced Panopticon:

“. . . a simultaneous exchange occurs between the two entities, our digital [profiles] and our in-real-life self. As we broadcast idealized portraits of our in-real-life self online, we then in turn adjust our in-real-life self so as to meet with popular approval when we are broadcast online again. At a certain point, our in-real-life self and digital [profiles] practically merge.”

Jeremy Weissman, The Crowdsourced Panopticon Forming an identity through the mechanism of profilicity has serious drawbacks. Firstly, it promotes an unhealthy degree of conformity. For to succeed in the world of social media is to conform as a successful profile is measured by metrics such as likes, shares and follows. But profilicity necessitates not just conforming to the preferences of one’s peer group, but also conforming to the standards set by those who manipulate the algorithms of social media, or as Weissman writes:

“Through the ever-increasing gaze of a pervasive audience online, we may become overly pressured, even coerced toward collective opinion, as social media’s mechanism of likes, dislikes, friends, and followers constantly subjects us to the crowd’s judgment along with that gaze.”

Jeremy Weissman, The Crowdsourced Panopticon By promoting a hyper-conformity, profilicty limits our potential as the generalized peer group of social media users, and the manipulators of social media algorithms, have no interest in many elements that comprise a healthy sense of self. With profilicity if we step too far out of line, if we are too unique, or if our value system diverges too far from what is deemed acceptable, we will be shunned, shamed and ostracized. Appearances, superficialities, and adhering to the values of popular culture are what matter with profilicity, not cultivating a harmonized mind, a healthy body and a fulfilling life. What is more if we live in a sick society, this sickness will be embodied in the preferences of the generalized peer group and so in seeking validation of this crowd, and embodying their preferences, we lock ourselves into a sick sense of self.

“Once we give up our true self to play a role, we are fated to be rejected because we have already rejected ourselves. Yet we will struggle to make the role more successful, hoping to overcome our fate but finding ourselves more enmeshed in it. We are caught in a vicious cycle that keeps closing in, diminishing our life and being.”

Alexander Lowen, Fear of Life

Continued:

https://academyofideas.com/2021/10/social-media-why-it-sicke...

>And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. The better your content is, the more it gets seen, and the more money you make. And yet, my felt experience of this change is the exact opposite—as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here?

It always tickles me when terminally online people realize that human connection doesn't scale. It's valuable precisely because it takes a lot of time, energy, and luck to establish. You want authenticity? Go find community in meatspace. You want authenticity online? Talk to those meatspace friends in private group chats.

"authenticity", "attention economy", "engagement"... This is just stirring the turds around in the cesspool. Deadbird is a net negative in the world, run by sociopath, and has no redeeming value, is actively harmful, but is addictive, like meth. Why do any of you actually care? Do something useful with your time.

Read Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars [1] and the "how did we get here" will become immediately clear.

[1] https://ia800100.us.archive.org/5/items/SilentWeaponsForQuie...

Community Notes is the best feature. I wonder why wouldn't original Twitter implement it. Maybe it would deflate the bias they wanted to project on the rest of us.