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036: The Network Effect

As it turns out, if I'm not in great condition or luck of the draw has it, when I take my ADHD meds they'll "misfire" and leave me completely scatterbrained and with a splitting headache. This happened *a lot* during my particularly awful semester Fall of 2020. The one I described in http://invisibleup.com/articles/32/, where I was barely managing to keep on top of feeding myself properly let alone anything else. ...yeah let's not dwell on that. But yes, I'm in that state right now, where for most of the day I was zoned out and watching YouTube videos. Kinda sucked, ngl.

Even funnier; I really haven't been taking my ADHD meds much lately because I'm just in a situation where I don't really need them. Good job, good living situation. Makes me wonder if I was completely lying to myself when I wrote my ADHD article, to justify taking the safety off and pushing past my brain desparately telling me to slow it down a notch. But then again, what choice did I have back then? It was either ace my classes or, I dunno, work at fast food forever.

See, okay, I completely lucked out here, because my gf I met online, FutureFractal, was wanting to get an apartment, and we wanted to live together, and we both had the funds to make that happen. So by sheer *circumstance* it all worked out, and I've been doing absolutely great. On top of that, I managed to luck into a industry-related job that pays well despite the fact that I haven't actually gotten my degree yet. So that's just utterly fortunate.

None of that had anything to do with the topic I really wanted to deep dive into: social media and the network effect. See, I tried quite hard to get into Mastodon and the small internet sphere and all that. For fucks sake, I started an entire damn private internet community on those principles. And here I am, spending entirely too much time on Twitter and Reddit and abandoning the world of long-form text content.

There's two big reasons for that. For one, as much as I avidly read damn near eveverything put in front of me, I just don't really have the patience to sit down and read thought pieces by random bloggers when I could instead just look at the pretty art on Twitter or keep tabs on Discord or go into Reddit rabbitholes.

"Why not replace the Reddit stuff with blog reading?", you ask. The reason, simply, is that there's a hell of a lot more stuff on Reddit. And some of it is very terribly wrong, sure (especially anything political), but there's lots of links to external sites and lots of posts and all of that. And it's pretty much guaranteed to be the non-commercial genuine kind of stuff I like.

But there is, in fact, a bit of a problem here. Specifically, a common issue in writing: deciding the thesis before finding the evidence to support it. Because a lot of my Redditing is going to a specific community or searching for a specific tag to find something I'm wanting to see. And there's still plenty of variety in what you're being exposed to for sure, but it doesn't quite hit the same mark of "surprise me" as hitting the floodgates of intellectual curiosity as what a random person has to ramble about.

But also, eh. I tried it. Didn't really care much for keeping up with random strangers' barely interesting blogs. Dropped it. Succumbed to the feed. Because the feed has everything I want, really, and if I want more, I can hit up those sources.

But that's not to say feeds don't exist on the Metaverse. Mastodon is a thing! It's got its thorns for sure, but it's a compelling alternative to Twitter, the other thing I'm really sucked into a lot of the time. Except, really, there's not a lot of people on Mastodon I want to follow? Being on Mastodon is, unfortunately, going to give you people who are biased to being mildly paranoid tech nerds like myself. And, like, that's okay, but I do want a bit more variety than that. Ditto with the Gemini sphere.

The thing about social networks, really, is that everyone will go where the things they want to see are. And, unfortunately, it's the big internet that provides that for so many people. While I personally don't use Facebook or TikTok, they are fantastic at providing a way to talk to IRL friends/family or to watch short form videos. Of course, both of those companies (and frankly Twitter and Reddit too) are pretty awful. I'm sure you already know the deets behind that so I won't bore you to tears with that.

"People where go where things are" seems like a hard and steady rule that unfortunately results in mass centralization, but there is, as it seems, one counter-exception to the rule. Let's take Discord as an example. Before that came on the scene, there were a variety of protocols such as Skype, MSN, IRC, AIM, Teamspeak, etc. You had a few apps like Pidgin to tie all the accounts together, and it seemed as if people were mostly content. But there was one small problem: they all quite sucked. Discord (and Slack in professional enviroments) came in and swept the floor with their slick UIs, easy "server" management and single-sign-on goodness. They provided an alternative that was so good, in fact, that everyone was willing to jump ship to the alternative.

I look at the occasional blog post or whatever saying "hey, let's all go back to IRC" or "join the Fediverse" or "let's all switch to Linux!" and I just shake my head. Fundamentally, yes, that is the correct thing to do. Take power away from big tech and decentralize, in the radical sense of the word. But the average user who unfortunately doesn't give enough of a crap to deal with all the thorns of weird projects will instead prefer the slick product with the vast sums of venture capitalist money poured into it.

The way to get people into these services, then, is to reduce the barrier to entry as much as possible. Make it so even myself completely dysfunctional and suffering from a terrible headache can use it. Neocities is a fantastic example of this principle applied to personal web sites. Asking people to pay up for a web host, administer a server, register a domain name? Lol no. Sign up for a free web service run by a host with no tolerance for sleezy bullcrap that provides a web editor and a directory listing for inspiration? That's what people will use.

Interestingly, the Tildeverse is close to this ideal. A bunch of smaller, locally organized servers with web/mail/Mastodon/etc. hosting, allowing for close connections with a vibrant, close-knit local community. It just, well, the last few times I've tried logging into tilde.town and keeping the IRC window open, I'd get maybe three messages in the span of several hours. It's something people are treating as a neat novelty for a few weeks instead of a full-on replacement for the modern web.

Perhaps this is in part because of the insular nature of smaller communities. Granted, I say this, and yet the Discord server for my own Park City is always alive and hopping, and has been since 2016 (well before I joined and kinda took over ownership, hah hah). But even there, there's members that join, post a few messages, and then just kinda never check up on us again. And that's fine. We can't be home for everyone. Tildes probably work very well for the small groups of people that really fit in with everyone else that's active there.

I'd argue that the issue with tildes, from this perspective, is the high cost of fully joining one. It's not quite like a Discord server where you can just check up on it when you're bored; it has everything from web hosting to IRC to whatever else. You're in, or you're out, and there's not a ton of incentive to be in if you can get everything you need socially from other sources. I already have a web host, a Mastodon host, a friend group. Tildes don't provide much for me besides a few IRC servers and a semi-active message board. And I can choose to engage with just those parts, but considering how utterly crap it is to try and use a text-mode SSH interface on anything other than my home PC, and how uncompelling the content is, I'm not gonna bother making it a major part of my internetting routine.

Going back a bit, I used to be an avid webcomic reader. I'd have RSS feeds for webcomics on my computer (first Google Reader, then bouncing along a few others before settling on the RSS reader built into Opera Mail), and I'd love keeping tabs on all the new pages. And I just don't anymore. Not only is finding new webcomics rather difficult with the death of Project Wonderful's ads, I don't have a great solution for syncing RSS feeds between my phone and my computer, now that I actually have a smartphone. I think I'd love to get back into webcomics, it's just... daunting. Some sort of mental block.

At this point I'm just rambling, so I think I've made my point. Small internet people: make your shit easier to use, please and thanks.