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Re: What is microblogging good for? (twinlog)

Posted at 2020-07-19

Original article at twinlog

I've wanted to write an article related to social networks for quite some time. After reading the article at twinlog, I decided to do it now.

First, some comments on the article.

Comments

Other significant properties are the perceived effort of sending and intrusiveness of receiving a message. Intrusiveness also has to do with publicity of the message: is it one-to-one, to a specific group or completely public. In my view only targeted messages can be intrusive. The most intrusive message type must be SMS, then email, then chat pings and private messages. The perceived effort of sending is low for chat, medium for email and high for a blog.

I agree there is different perceived effort of sending and intrusiveness but I don't agree on how you ranked everything. As for me, there's no real difference between SMS and private messages. SMS and IM apps look the same nowadays, so I'd put these two types of communication on the same place. Then, email is not intrusive at all. It can take a long time to answer an email and it's ok. Chat pings are in the middle. So, this is my intrusiveness ranking: private messages (either SMS or IM), chat pings, email.

The most basic one might be simple daily things with your family or colleagues. You pick a somewhat intrusive message type because it's important to get an answer. Mostly a chat is suitable; you don't need a long text but you hope for a quick answer.

For more detailed discussions, whether technical, philosophical or something else, you have two main options. Either you discuss ideas in real time with other people, simulating a real-life discussion (which a chat is good for). Or you use long-form text and put in some effort while writing. Since the bottleneck tends to be thinking, a higher latency and required effort does not matter. Email (for limited-audience discussions) or a blog (for public) are good fits.

Agreed. Long texts occur in chats too tho.

Discussions that are too complex for chats often happen and communities try to do something with that. Some of them move to Discord where there is that channel thing that lets you divide discussion to different topics. Some of them create subchats; it's quite common for chats to have a main chat and an off-topic one.

This is where I scratch my head. Maybe there's another type of discussion that microblogging is a good fit for? <...> Microblogging seems good for nothing. Please convince me otherwise!

Okay.

What is microblogging good for?

First, we need to understand microblogging traits.

Opt-out publicity. Some people say that it's a bad thing¹ but I think it's the best way.
It's micro. Posts are short and are atomic. It forces bloggers to split their unstructured brain flow into a nice stream of tweets where each tweet is a distinct idea.
Interactivity. You can ignore, like, share and comment posts. The four stages of engagement to rule them all. You either don't care about/don't like like the post, like it, like it so much that you want your friends to see it to or you want to tell something to the author (peak engagement).
Finality. Neither tweets nor toots can be edited. You can only delete them. It forces you to think twice about what you write and it can even serve as an evidence in a court!

So, what conversations can you have with these 4 traits?

Public conversations. Good for things that you want everyone to know, like sharing your knowledge and people's responses.
Conversations that discuss each paragraph and not the article in the whole. This type of feedback is more informative, I guess.
Interactive conversations. You know, I don't get much feedback on gemini, it makes me sad. Meanwhile, twitter people at least press the like button.
Final conversations. You can be sure that your opponent won't change their words to correct their mistakes

I think it sounds good enough.

Although traits I listed are generally advantages, they can be disadvantages. Read the ¹ for more opinionated article about that.

¹ Demifiend on social networks

Why public discussions matter?

According to my view on life, humans must leave traces. This is the only way to make their lives not miserable. A bad trace is a trace too, by the way. People we agree to call bad are remembered. Meanwhile, there are millions of people that we have no chance to remember because they left no trace. It's the worst.

Public discussions are a way to leave a trace. What if years later a youngster reads your twitter rant on something and it will change their life goals? I like to think that my texts have made an impact on someone. Well, there were several people who thanked me for my writing or liked it. I guess, it counts as an impact?

All my software is open source for the same reason. I really liked GitHub's recent Arctic Code Vault program because it ensured there is a way to access some of my texts in the future. I'm sure I've left a trace already and I'm still young! Life has a meaning and it's already fulfilled. No reason to worry then. Plenty of time to create a better trace.

Keeping private things private

Although talking public is cool, some things shall keep being private. I'm sure there are some things deep in the net I said several years ago that may strike me later. It's a trend in the West nowadays, right? Destroying people's lives for something they did a long time ago... Be sure to think what you say.

Media diet

This section is highly relatable to twitter. One has to keep their feed clear of things that bring negative emotions. You know, politics, scandals, toxic people. Eliminate them by unsubscribing. It's easy.

Conclusion

I hope I convinced you, dancek, that microblogging has its uses. I also talked about meaning of life and criticized modern society; things we do in gemini, yeah.

Update: 2020-07-23

This article is followed by another one which replies to replies to this very article.

gemini://tanelorn.city/~bouncepaw/gemlog/re-microblogging-why-2.gemini