We might be seeing the death of microblogging platforms

[kodeb8]

So I've never been super big on microblogging, mainly because it's hard to get any engagement. You basically have to be extremely terminally online and build a cult of personality around yourself for people to listen to you, and I don't like that shit, it's not like a forum where you can just log in once a day and people can read your posts even if they don't know you. Anyways, despite this, I still tried to play along with the microblogging thing. Over the years I've switched between different platforms, with Gab being the latest one, but a few days ago, Gab pulled one of the stupidest moves I've ever seen. You now have to pay $10/mo for the privilege of posting images... I shit you not. So, that's the end of Gab for me, and I think the end of microblogging in general. No way I'm ever using twitter or facebook, truthsocial is a glitchy mess and an eco chamber of qboomers, and the fediverse has its own set of issues. It just came to me there's pretty much no microblogging site I want to use, they've all decided to pull a really stupid move that alienates their users. They're all bleeding users, and it seems like the younger people don't care about microblogging, they're all mostly on tiktok and instagram. Idk, it seems like zoomers and gen alpha can't sit down to read text, they need everything told to them via videos and pictures, so I've come to the conclusion that the activity of "microblogging" is more of millennial, gen x and boomer thing, and it'll die with the millennial, gen x and boomer generations.

 

[turntableToothache]

Gab's the exception, not the rule, I doubt any other big platform will follow suit. Normies may be easily conditioned but I find it hard to believe even they would accept paying 10 dollars just to post images, that sounds like a quick way to kill your platform, and in sites like Twitter even more. Then again normies pay money every month to not get ads on Youtube when they could just as easily get an adblocker for free, we'll see if companies are willing to take the risk and see if people are ok with having even less freedom online.

 

[dorgon]

If you read the Dead Internet article here on agoraroad, you'll notice one of the primary conclusions to this crisis is to return to a model where private website owners create content, and join curated web rings. Firstly, it takes publishing power OUT of the hands of the corrupt platform owners and their financers. Secondly, it requires content creators to have substance and be worth reading (meritocracy), which is huge. Social media has allowed quality publications to be utterly destroyed in an ocean of drivel, which in turn, lowers the average intelligence of the population, and fragments their ability to know what facts are vs uneducated conjecture or misinfo.

Absolutely. And I will expand upon this by saying that websites, especially website built by HTML and CSS, allow you full reign of creativity to your blogging site. This means that if you know the language (and HTML/CSS isn't that hard to start with) you can easily build a website the way YOU want, with YOUR tastes, and how YOU want it to look and represent yourself. Hosting your own website is in my opinion the pinnacle of a free internet because it basically allows you virtually full reign about what you get to say. Now, I don't self-host my website (I am on neocities because I'm a broke boy) but I still have the full advantage of customizing whatever I want on my website, rather than only setting a banner and a pfp on any of those microblogging sites. And webrings are espcially great because it fosters a local tightly-knit community on the internetz, which means you won't be seeing propaganda and psyops on your feed everyday, and you will be chatting with people whom you enjoy online company with. Other than the $50 or whatever hosting fee per year, I don't really see any downsides of a website.

The only thing preventing 'online culture' from fixing this situation with quality sites and link exchanges is 1) laziness and 2) having to admit you don't have anything worth saying. In which case, you might as well embrace tik-tok. Yes this is a kind of gatekeeping, but its natural selection, and its necessary.

Another advantage of websites is that it pretty much by default encourages gatekeeping. Even if a normie who has nothing to say except for the Correct Opinions™ decides to host a website, it will not garner much views other than the people who agree with all of his nonsense, because people will find it boring. Whereas on any major social media platform algorithms will constantly push goyslop in your face and it will fry your dopamine receptors like a well-done Chick-Fil-A sandwich. This relates to my previous point about smaller online communities, as you have to actually come in and respect the culture/what's goin on of what you want to join, before you join (Especially when it comes to webrings).

 

[Deleted member 7044]

They're all bleeding users

They are, but not fast enough sadly. Twitter is still kicking despite Musk turning it into a military burn pit.
One of these days the bubble will burst and many of these sites will break down once people realize there isn't a way to make them profitable.

 

[Amadis]

These businesses have never made money. They exist purely off speculative cashflow based on how many eyes they get. Now that third worlders for the most part all have iphone 3s or whatever, their "exponential growth" is being shown to have pretty much no value. Its all indians and bots. As soon as economies switch from debt based currency to cowshit based then giant tech companies can become what they were always meant to be.

Macroblogging is seeing a growth in popularity because its the format of the SOVL. In 2040 only web-domain owning citizens will be allowed to vote. Second-class instagram shitters will become maids in your house. While you update the css on your cunny supremacy website they will be watching Reels inbetween rounds of licking dirt off your feet.

 

[Voicedrew]

virgin Microblogging "platforms" vs chad Voicedrew.xyz microblog

 

[Obake]

It just came to me there's pretty much no microblogging site I want to use, they've all decided to pull a really stupid move that alienates their users.

You pretty much just described the modern internet in general. It used to be so easy to find a handful of communities to hang out in but mainstream social media killed that. I guess discord servers are still the current trend but I hate it so much and I'm not even old.

Idk, it seems like zoomers and gen alpha can't sit down to read text, they need everything told to them via videos and pictures

This is a big problem that has been worsening for years and especially became bad recently due to the pandemic. Young people have basically no reading comprehension skills.

 

[Cammell]

I know I can just google this but what is micro blogging?

And why I just learned about it, everybody here seems to know what it is

 

[Obake]

I know I can just google this but what is micro blogging?

And why I just learned about it, everybody here seems to know what it is

I don't even know either I'm guessing Tumblr but that's not really a blog

 

[kodeb8]

I guess discord servers are still the current trend but I hate it so much and I'm not even old.

I don't mind Discord too much since chatrooms have been a staple of computer communication pretty much since the first computers were linked together, long before the web and even the modern internet existed.

This is a big problem that has been worsening for years and especially became bad recently due to the pandemic. Young people have basically no reading comprehension skills.

I will say that this started to become a problem all the way back in the 50s when TVs became a standard household item, and the reading comprehension of every generation after and including the boomers has been getting worse and worse.

 

[kodeb8]

I know I can just google this but what is micro blogging?

And why I just learned about it, everybody here seems to know what it is

You know, social media sites that are about writing short messages, with Twitter being the main example.

 

[PawjamaCat]

I don't mind Discord too much since chatrooms have been a staple of computer communication pretty much since the first computers were linked together, long before the web and even the modern internet existed.


I will say that this started to become a problem all the way back in the 50s when TVs became a standard household item, and the reading comprehension of every generation after and including the boomers has been getting worse and worse.

The goalpost of when generations started "getting worse" due to technology has gone back hundreds of years. There's quotes from people during the era of the printing press complaining that books becoming common place will destroy the youths memories. Not to say the acceleration of life, and therefore the collecting and processing of information, isn't a bad thing; I certainly think it is. But I also think a lot of the modern issues we're seeing have to do with more than just the modern ways people accrue information.

 

[turntableToothache]

This is a big problem that has been worsening for years and especially became bad recently due to the pandemic. Young people have basically no reading comprehension skills.

This happened to me the other day. I wanted to show a friend a funny anecdote I found, and it was like 2 paragraphs long, when I showed it to him he said "bro that shit's long af i aint reading allat" and I was surprised because I didn't even think it was that long. At some point the youth is gonna need a tiktok video to read the instructions on shampoo bottles.

 

[Jodo_Fan]

I know I can just google this but what is micro blogging?

And why I just learned about it, everybody here seems to know what it is

Twitter, Mastodon, etc. Platforms designed to promote or enforce short (micro) posts and updates (blogging).

 

[Obake]

This happened to me the other day. I wanted to show a friend a funny anecdote I found, and it was like 2 paragraphs long, when I showed it to him he said "bro that shit's long af i aint reading allat" and I was surprised because I didn't even think it was that long. At some point the youth is gonna need a tiktok video to read the instructions on shampoo bottles.

I posted something on /g/ a few days ago about how I thought whether in form A or B, the specific tech we were talking about will absolutely be the future. Some kid replied to me calling me a retard because THE FUTURE IS 'B', NOT 'A'

Yeah kid, I said whether it's in form A or Form B, it's the future.

 

[Regal]

Small plug for the micro.blog indie project. Not a user of it, but a fan of the platform. It isn't free, but that's the price of not being a product and supporting an indie project.

 

[Fairykang]

There's quotes from people during the era of the printing press complaining that books becoming common place will destroy the youths memories.

Plato said the same thing about writing in general if iirc.

 

[turntableToothache]

The next stage of this exercise is to limit the capabilities of speech itself, which George Orwell predicted with his concept of NewSpeak. This has already manifested to a significant degree in the form of memes - a type of digital cave painting that attempts to express concepts in very simple ways, but is extremely limited when it comes to more complex ideas, or anything resembling instructions.

Through censorship this can and has been done to great effect in the modern age. What Orwell couldn't have predicted, however, was the idea that people would censor themselves, without any obligation to or fear of higher authorities. But rather by peer pressure and commoners themselves being taught that certain words are "bad" and even saying them full, even if there's nothing, moral or legal, stopping them from doing so, is akin to criminal.
Today, this can be seen among the youth who has grown in sites like TikTok, where words such "kill" "porn" "rape" "pedophile" "suicide" are immediately censored. If you pay attention, the youth refers to these concepts by comedically innapropiate substitutes like "unalive" "corn" "grape" "SA" "unalive" or by just adding a bunch of numbers and other unusual characters to the word (e.g "k*ll", "p3d0ph1l3"). This goes far beyond just TikTok censoring these words, you can still see these people using these stupid substitutes in places where there's no obligation or fear of censorship. This is because younger generations have been conditioned to believe that the use of such words can be considered "triggering" to people who they may relate to (e.g saying "rape" can trigger a rape victim's trauma). As a result, people who use the normal words used to refer to these concepts are seen as tone deaf or insensitive for using the proper word, rather than stupid substitutes that mean the exact same thing. TikTok's censorship is merely a layer of this conditioning, as the main perpetrators are, as usual, those trying to hide behind a veneer of "we're just looking out for the children/whatever vulnerable group you care about".

 

[Dolfin]

This happened to me the other day. I wanted to show a friend a funny anecdote I found, and it was like 2 paragraphs long, when I showed it to him he said "bro that shit's long af i aint reading allat" and I was surprised because I didn't even think it was that long.

"TL;DR" is also such a funny thing to say that I'm afraid it imprinted on younger folks as cooler or more normal than actually reading lots of words. I haven't yet seen an example of someone being mocked for reading a long post and responding to it with genuine thought, but if I do, I'm bringing magnets to datacenters.

At some point the youth is gonna need a tiktok video to read the instructions on shampoo bottles.

Not your point, but between many years of parental guidance and numerous advertisements featuring attractive people washing their hair, I hope that no one in this world has to read the instructions for shampoo.

 

[kodeb8]

Through censorship this can and has been done to great effect in the modern age. What Orwell couldn't have predicted, however, was the idea that people would censor themselves, without any obligation to or fear of higher authorities. But rather by peer pressure and commoners themselves being taught that certain words are "bad" and even saying them full, even if there's nothing, moral or legal, stopping them from doing so, is akin to criminal.

This video talks about this phenomena and gives a pretty good comparison


The tl;dr is that he compares this phenomena to a similar phenomena present in 1970s soviet countries. Most people had lost faith in communism by this point, but everyone still pretended like communism was great, not even due to an authoritarian government banning decent, but out of an omnipresent peer pressure everyone felt to keep up the charade. I guess it's also similar to that old story about the emperor's clothes.