Conversation

Social media is like horseless carriage. A bad extension of an absent reference. It’s not a personalized/customized long-tail extension of broadcast media. It’s not a 7-billion channel universe. I think those mental models have become severely limiting.
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It is no longer clear to me why the hell we’re all connecting up randomly and indiscriminately simply because we can. Even among people with pragmatic reasons to broadcast/control a distribution channel it is now getting absurd.
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The marginal value of another random twitter follower or LinkedIn/FB connection is probably negative now unless you’re an industrial scale mainstream culture producer like a pop music star
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And it is unclear that the 1:1 connection is the right abstraction for programming out social graph presence. It’s assembly language for sociability and I don’t want to be there anymore. I want C or Java level leveraged programmability.
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Why can’t I declare some interests and filter criteria and then have an auto-generated script go wire up the follows for me and generate the stream? Why are we stuck with manual lists as state of art?
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And why the hell does gatekeeping mainly involve this belligerent protocol of blocks and mutes? Do you leave a party, having met people you likely won’t meet again by yelling “fuck you, I never want to see you again!” or “bye, nice to meet you”?
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We're still only in the first decades of the Internet. "Social media" has only existed for a fraction of that time. We'll develop new models and switch to them as we learn how to properly use our new connective possibilities. It's already happened several times!
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All want connection. We connect randomly to randoms who pique our interest. After some time, it hits us "these connections are weak". look around for something deeper - don't find it. Resigned to feel any connection - we turn back to the randoms - now a bit more important than b4
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Huh, that's an interesting question. Elimination of friction i.e. simply because we can seems to be the easy answer here. Tangential but related is this Ben Thompson post on friction.
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