Untangling Threads - Erin Kissane's small internet website
"survivable futures require that we all have access to better ways to be together online"
The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams - Waxy.org
Andy Baio's "told you so" about Ello. would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic. VC kills everything it touches
The Thesis Whisperer
"Please stop encouraging academics to use social media as a way to create research impact and engagement."
Facebook's Threads is so depressing - by Jason O. Gilbert
"Have you ever been high/drunk and you walk into a CVS and the security guard is staring at you? That’s what Threads is. It’s deodorants locked behind plastic. It’s TikTok Hype Houses. It is Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. It’s a sneaker collab between Nike and JP Morgan. It’s your favorite stand-up comic showing up in a commercial for Carvana. "
The algorithmic anti-culture of scale - by Ryan Broderick
on Threads: "It’s like watching two large cryptocurrencies trade with each other. No cultural value is ever really generated, but the numbers go up. And these creators all operate with a nervous intensity that feels almost biblical, constantly jumping to and from recycled trends, hoping to please a finicky and vengeful god that treats them like an invasive species. And, save only a few, most of the Meta creators I’ve met seem to, in return, deeply loathe the content they make, the people who like it, and Meta, itself."
/u/spez is right about feudalism and that’s why reddit as we know it is doomed | maya.land
extremely smart, damn "You need manorialism to make little farmers produce surplus, and you need moderation to make openly hosted user-generated content ad-monetizable"
Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
"Tiktok won't just starve performers of the "free" attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing."
User Generated Content and the Fediverse: A Legal Primer | Electronic Frontier Foundation
"an introduction to some common legal issues, along with a few practical considerations" (much of which seems to apply to hosting ugc in general?)
Of Hegel jokes and hole-walls, or, why Twitter is good actually
"It’s really nice to be on the edge of a community... and to be able to smoothly transition inwards and outwards as time passes. My Twitter timeline is a record of my passing interests and side-projects.... Something in the structure of Twitter makes it ideal for this kind of mixing and matching, a lurker’s paradise. [...] By leaving communities implicit, Twitter allows for a much more nuanced sense of what it means to be part of something."
The Edenic Allure of Ballerinafarm - by Anne Helen Petersen
"If I asked a teenager to create an Animal Crossing Island with a farm aesthetic, they might create something close to what Ballerina Farm looks like." [...] "... Mormon culture often tells girls they should grow up to be something kind of like an AGA. Always on. Divided into compartments — one that is ready to receive whatever needs warming, one that is always prepared to produce something sustaining. A surface that is not too hot to the touch. But enough warmth to extend to all the people in the space around you, all the while burning through more fuel than you can shake a damn stick at."
A Teenager Has Remade Myspace and Everyone Is Loving It
A TikToker's Theories About Mormonism and Instagram Influencers
"Kim explains that since the religion prioritizes women marrying and starting families young, blogging has become a natural outlet for people to share their domestic lives, all with a coat of glamour. And it allows them to generate income without having to compromise their duties at home. The way Mormon women have used the internet to manage these basic needs has come to define a huge portion of the influencer culture we consume and criticize today."
How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s complicated story - Vox
'[T]he structure of Twitter and the way it rewards a constant escalation of emotion makes it exceedingly difficult to just back down, to say, “I thought I was doing the right thing, but I hurt somebody very badly in the process.”'