(2023-08-02) Robin Sloan On Social Media After Twitter

Robin Sloan on Social Media After Twitter. Well, I think it’s a healthy thing. I think all these platforms have held on for a little too long.

there was this time in the middle to late 2000s when it seemed like there was something new every month

It was a ferment; it really had a sense of percolation and fizz. And it was a scene, it was a creative scene

But I really do believe it was healthier in a way that any ecosystem ought to kind of bubble and fizz and percolate. And then something happened in the 2010s. We just got locked in and we knew the dramatis personae of the internet of that period. It’s Twitter and it’s Facebook and it’s Google

You had a short story in The Atlantic, “The Conspiracy Museum,” which I really enjoyed. (2020-05-31 SloanTheConspiracyMuseum)

RS: I think a change that has happened to Twitter under its new administration that many people complain about is actually a healthy one for everyone else, for the body politic, for all the overlapping public squares that we have in this country and in this world. That change has been actually to lock it down, to make it much more difficult for people to access Twitter, just to search for a name, maybe their name, maybe a URL, maybe the title of a book, or even to look at people’s profiles

I think that’s great. Because it makes the argument or recognizes the truth, that Twitter is just one little thing. It’s not the public square.

that’s how it ought to be, I think. There ought to be many websites, and they ought to have these little boundaries around them.

Twitter was never that popular. It was never particularly successful compared to many of its peers. It’s like, miniscule, I mean, to their great frustration.

But it was the story around it that created and supported that. That sense of a place in the public sphere. And I do think that that story now has changed.

WT: Here’s some concerns that I have: I feel like if you don’t have centralized platforms, then you have what already may be happening, where you end up with like liberal social media platforms and conservative social media platforms. And those platforms may find it easier to disseminate facts that aren’t fact checked. (red vs blue)

But I think that danger has been ever present. I think you could relate similar anecdotes 100 years ago, and 200 years ago, of course, all the media would have been different. I guess I’m just a believer in small pieces loosely joined.

To sign so much of our attention over to this one particular algorithm—and I don’t even mean in terms of politics, I think politics is one dimension that people understandably focus on – but I think the way it guides and directs people’s behavior, the way they read, the way they watch things, the kinds of things they watch

You know, there ought to be a TikTok. There ought to just be 50 more TikToks and that way, they can all be a little bit different. It can become an ecosystem instead of, I guess we could say, a monoculture.