Just a thought that’s been brewing in the back of my mind.
Since I stopped attending forums, I used to pretty much only use social media twitter as a content feed. Y’know, follow artists and gaming news. Never interacted with a soul on there, I think.
A couple years ago I joined Mastodon in an attempt to maybe try and actually interact with people again. It kind of worked, there’s a small handful people from there I still talk to sometimes.
But, there’s an experience I kept having (and part of it was probably just Mastodon’s own cultural problems):
I would occasionally log on and just see fallout. Something major happened, somebody said some dumb shit, whatever. It usually happens in American timezone peak hours (no shade intended–there was just more of you in those spaces, so you get more of those kinda people, too). It really feels like that meme of the pizza guy in the burning room.
What happened? I could invest quite a bit of time in research (decentralized nature of it didn’t help on this one!), or I could ask somebody, or… I could just not bother. Which is what I ended up choosing most of the time, but I feel like that was a pretty bad choice overall. Didn’t make me feel more connected with peeps, either way.
But I think I was only partially culpable for it. All modern social media (including Cohost!) are, like, immediate-mode. Feed-based. And I think being feed-based is a much bigger contributing issue to social media sucking for social things than any specific implementation part (chronological timeline would be nice I guess, but it won’t fix Twitter).
i tend to be very picky about how i curate my social media spaces these days because of this phenomenon. there’s a very real issue with, for lack of a better term, “outrage” interactions which tends to ripple far enough away from its epicenter that you end up with a contact-high by proxy of knowing people who knew some people who saw this Thing somewhere, and anything to distract from the genuine horrors is good enough
right now, i’m in a bit of a wintering mode and have cut off my time on mastodon, bluesky, and instagram unless i need to promote myself or help others get their work seen. cohost (and discord, though my brain classifies that as different because it is a chat room and not a messy feed-based hellsite) has been my window out to the world because i very rarely have any drama show up on my feeds without needing to constantly prune and mute, but i know the site has drama just as much as any and would be much more commonplace if its userbase were at a larger scale
i lack the foresight to imagine a new social media that could completely defang this kind of passive toxicity, but maybe someday we’ll have a better way
There’s definitely something to be said about microblogging restricting people’s abilities to express their ideas, which leads to misundestandings or aggressive hot takes being dispensed rather than fully formed thoughts, but the concept of having a fully social, open for all space often leads to unrelated, harmful subjects being spread to unwilling people.
I was thinking about this over Bluesky today; Much like Twitter - or any other social place - I’ve never actually followed or interacted with any of the big name toxic meltdowns that have happened over the years, or even the small name toxic meltdowns. Nonetheless, I’ve always witnessed it because social media folks have a compulsion to share/repost those folks, even if its just a screencap; there’s this absurd idea of “if I got mad seeing this, then you have too” which I never fathomed. Others have, in a more crass way, compared to bringing a piece of shit to someone and smearing on them, then acting confused on why the person would ask them to not do that again.
Which all boils down to social media being an “everyone place” rather than just a place for a few folks. Things like this never, or very rarely, happened in Forums because those spaces were for a few dozens or hundred people who were interested in talking to each other. Maybe a heated argument would spill from one subforum to the other, or a bad faith poster would act in multiple parts of the community, but it was still a contained zone. With major social media we’re connected to literal millions of people, and have very little control of the atrocities, minor or major, that are smeared on our faces.
this whole post is legit, especially being directly embroiled in some of the Fallout lmfao i can speak to that for sure.
this speaks to me the most. having this place around for the past week, i wonder why we ever even let forums go? i personally love topic-based conversations. they help maintain context, make it easier for new people to know each other because they can talk around a specific thing, etc. etc. feeds are cool for some things, but they require a level of entropy that’s exhausting to ramp up on whenever you’re on a new site.
also when someone’s being a shit on a forum you can just blast them into space lmao
An aside, and this may just be my inner boomer speaking, but as much as a Discourse forum is an improvement, I feel like, as a piece of software, it still suffers from Modern Web Design Brainrot lmao. Something about the classic phpBB big user avatars + stats/titles/whatever + forum signatures on every post made it very unambiguous that you’re talking with specific real people.
And to segue, forums used to very much be curated personal spaces on top of being social spaces. That’s a very important core essence that was lost in the “market square of the internet” era.
Yea, I’m having some actual struggles posting in Discourse because it all feels like the modern interface of “hide all the buttons and functions to make it seem more sleek” of post 2010s Internet
This is obviously not Mint’s fault, I just don’t vibe at all with these types of designs
I kinda feel this but I also acknowledge that I am a sicko whose reaction to a new round of incomprehensible twitter discourse is “oh come on why is it every time I touch grass like you all say to do I come back and this site gets even dumber”
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