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December 22, 2023

Substack and "platform risk"

It’s quite ironic that I spend part of my professional life warning publishers and content creators about platform risk while publishing a newsletter on Substack.

Platform risk can be summed up as the exposure you have to the whims and decisions of platforms on which your business depends. The example that I use a lot is Google: when your revenue depends on mass scale traffic from Google’s organic search results, changes in the algorithm can wipe you out overnight.

But there are other platform risks too. Twitter is a good example of this. For years, journalists and publishers cultivated their individual and brand presences on the social network, not because it delivered huge amounts of traffic (it was low single digits for many brands) but because it was a good place to establish a brand. It was disproportionately used by media people, and so had significant second order effects: you got the attention of people who could bring you more attention via other channels.

That and, as I always say, journalists are gossipy little creatures and Twitter was the world’s biggest journo watercooler. Your audience might not have been on there, but your friends and rivals were.

That’s why Twitter’s implosion under Elon “don’t give them their money back” Musk is so painful for many in media. A lot of independent creators, in particular, have been caught between not wanting anything to do with a platform where abuse of various kinds is encouraged rather than just tolerated, and wanting to protect their livelihood, which depends on connections on Twitter.

Which leads me on to Substack, and the overnight response of its executives to a letter from over 200 users of the service asking it not to host content by Nazis. There were many possible communications approaches the Substack execs could have taken. They appear to have chosen the worst of all worlds.

I’m not going to go into too much detail about why their response is bunk. Ken White has a good summary, and Nick Heer also has a good take. I will, though, note that Substack’s attempt to portray itself as a “haven for free speech” means “speech we decide is acceptable”: the platform does not allow porn, which is protected free speech in the US. Clearly the company is applying its values to decisions about what to host. Porn is bad, but Nazis – actual, real, Nazis – are fine.

Substack is allowed to apply its values to its business. But that also applies to individuals. Freedom of association is as foundational a right as free speech. In fact, arguably, more so. Without freedom of association, freedom of speech is (literally) so much hot air.

Of course, it applies to me too. And one of my core values, really quite a simple one, is not contributing to giving a platform to racists and fascists. Literal Nazis definitely fall into that bucket. By being here, even with a small audience, I am saying I am OK with platforming Nazis.

I am not, for the avoidance of doubt, OK with platforming Nazis. And I don’t want to do business with those that are.

So as of some point between Christmas and New Year – the traditional period for changing tech – I’ll be moving my Substack and mailing list to Wordpress.com, which I already use to host this site. WordPress has features for mailing lists, including paid subscriptions, and it’s easy to move your email addresses over there. Of course, I need to work out how to migrate existing content too.

If you’re currently a free subscriber on Substack, this will be almost completely seamless, except you won’t be able to automatically read my posts in the Substack app (no great loss, in my opinion, but your mileage may vary). You will, though, be able to subscribe via RSS in the Substack app if you really want to.

If you’re an annual paid Subscriber, you’ll be comped a full year starting in January. If you’re a monthly subscriber, you’ll be comped three months (if I can do it – I need to check if that’s possible, but I’ll work something out). As a reminder at present there are no additional benefits to anyone who pays, but I really appreciate that you do.

Ironically, WordPress charges me less of a cut than Substack, because I already host my site there. But if you want to move your own Substack and don’t want to pay a monthly fee, you can do that too – the free plan includes paid emails, at the same rate as Substack.

This move should happen before the new year, and I’ll keep subscribers updated about my progress and any snags I hit along the way. Then, at some point around the middle of January, I will be deleting my Substack, and my account.

Of course, if you disagree with this decision or aren’t comfortable with WordPress.com, please do unsubscribe! Your freedom of association is as important as mine.

July 6, 2023

Some quick thoughts on Threads

This is very obviously v0.9

Some fairly fundamental things are missing. Support for ActivityPub, which would allow you to follow Threads users from Mastodon, isn’t there yet. There’s no web interface, which means the only way to post from the desktop is to use the Android app running on the Windows Android Subsystem (I presume it works with ChromeOS’ equivalent). You can’t run the iOS app on Apple Silicon Macs, either.

Most egregious for an app which is spun out of an image platform, there’s support for alt text. This should have been there from the start, no excuses.

It feels like it’s really 2-3 weeks away from launch, but Meta obviously saw a window of opportunity thanks to the last few days chaos on Twitter and decided to push the big red button.

I’m not seeing much to worry Mastodon users

Having seen it and read what Eugen has to say I don’t think the sky is falling in for Mastodon. It will be cool to be able to follow people who exist in a Threads world from my Mastodon account. I’ll have the advantage too of a straightforward chronological feed. Which leads me to…

The feed was a mess at the start, but it got better fast

The feed is clearly algorithmic (and I would say that it really needs a chronological option). There were a lot of complaints about the number of posts from people you didn’t follow in the feed from very early adopters.

Break it down, though, and that’s entirely to be expected. You might follow lots of people but early on they may not even have actually been registered – it effectively flagged anyone you followed on Instagram so that when they registered for Threads, you followed them. And of the people who created accounts, many didn’t post much to start.

So Meta did what Meta does: it gave you something fresh to look at, every time you refreshed your feed or opened the app. Hence, lots of posts from people you don’t follow that the algorithm thought you might be interested in, based on almost no data.

At first my feed was horrible. It’s now fine, and unless I do some doom refreshing all I see is people I follow. If you judged it from the first ten seconds you saw your feed, you really should calm down a little.

Twitter is dead, dead, dead

Within 24 hours on Threads you can find most politicians, media brands, celebrities and sports teams. A lot of what made Twitter good for the kind of ordinary person was being able to connect to and talk about that things – and Twitter was the only platform you could do that, other than Instagram. Now you can connect with all the same people, with text posts.

Less than 24 hours in, Threads has 30m users – it could eclipse Twitter’s scale in a month or too. There is just no reason for Twitter to exist now. It’s just Gab with a couple of hundred million dormant accounts.

There are some serious tests of moderation capabilities ahead

Which leads us nicely on to moderation, and there are many tests of the skills of Meta’s moderation teams and policies to come. Already, some of the most horrible abusive accounts like LibsOfTikTok are on the platform. Is Meta going to ban them when they start spewing hatred and encouraging violence? Zuckerberg has spoken about Threads being a “kind” platform. If he really means that, they are going to have to come down on accounts like LibsOfTikTok hard and fast. We shall see.

The future for Bluesky is not that bright

Unfortunately we can probably consign the likes of T2 and Post to the “where are they now?” file of 2024. Which leaves Bluesky, which recently opened up invites and got quite a few more people in. It had also been pretty vibrant last weekend, when Twitter was melting down – I think that was the last straw for quite a few people.

I think Bluesky is dead. It has some nice technical ideas – shared blocklists, feeds you can programme yourself – but the whole idea of building this on a new, alternative protocol rather than using ActivityPub has meant it’s been trying to tap-dance and unicycle at the same time. It’s been too much, it’s slowed down its ability to scale up, and it probably means it’s missed its window. Those two technical sweeties are outweighed by the fact that most people I know are already on Threads, and I don’t have to search for them.

I quite like it

I wasn’t expecting to like Threads, but I do – or rather I like being connected to friends, old colleagues and family on a text-based social network. I like being able to follow the odd team, celeb, brand or politician.

I don’t hate the algorithm, although I would prefer to be able to default to reverse chronological. When ActivityPub support arrives, I’ll probably just follow a bunch of people on Threads from my Mastodon account, so I get to use a reverse chronological feed and use the powerful filters you have there.

There’s a lot for Meta to do to make it really work, but it’s a good solid start.

May 1, 2023

Mastodon, BlueSky, and Highlander Syndrome

I am total agreement with Jamie Zawinski here. There is no way I will trust anything that Jack Dorsey has anything to do with. He’s either incredibly naive – in which case he should be nowhere near a service which requires trust and safety to be at the front of everyone’s minds – or he knew what Musk was like and didn’t care (in which case… you guessed it).

I don’t, though, really care if people jump from Twitter to BlueSky. There is room for more than one successful microblogging platform and different people will have priorities which aren’t the same as mine. I don’t particularly want to spent a massive amount of effort on a centralised service, but you might feel differently.

There is a lot of Highlander syndrome here: “there can be only one” social network which wins, there can be only one platform which everyone must be on. Some of this comes from the narratives which tech journalists love to write about. Conflict sells, conflict drives clicks, and if you can personalise the conflict to two “heroic founder” figures duking it out, all the better.

This isn’t, by the way, some kind of failing solely in journalism. Our oldest and most fundamental narratives frame things as battles between giants. The myths of gods and heroes are full of them, and seeing founders in the same vein is just part of the same old story. We do it with kings, religious leaders, scientists, you name it. Even our efforts to celebrate the collective often devolve back into hero worship. We’re just not very good at celebrating the collective, unless we have a clear enemy to stand against.

June 7, 2020

Weeknotes, Sunday 7th June

Some notes on anger

I’ve found myself getting astonishingly angry over the course of the week. There’s a lot to be angry about, but anger never sits well on me for long. The anger is, of course, well placed. Whether you’re angry about the government’s utter incompetence over COVID-19, the structural and personal racism which oppresses black people the world over, or a famous author’s transphobia (and yes, please, let’s not call it anything else), there is much to be angry about.

I’ve come to see social media in general and Twitter in particular as forces for ill in society, not good. That puts in me a small minority: there’s still plenty of people in tech who see the effects of social media as, on balance, a social good. When you see the impact that the awful death of George Floyd had, amplified to billions of people via social media, then you can see their point. Perhaps, now, we will get real change.

But anyone who has worked in social media management will tell you that the way to maximise your reach isn’t to make well-honed arguments but to to provoke emotion, and there is no better emotion to provoke in politics than anger. Twitter is a hate machine. We mock Trump’s Twitter use, but he’s a master at it, because he understands the fundamental rule: when you have people angry, if you want to reach more people, get them more angry still. Pile anger on to anger, until the world is burning.

Social media spread the news of George Floyd’s death further and with more impact than any other medium in history could have, and that is undoubtedly a good thing. But social media doesn’t give us any way out of the anger. It doesn’t give us any “and now what”. All it can do is keep making us more angry, because it rewards making you feel, not making you think.

But anger alone isn’t enough to solve social problems and, worse still, it’s addictive. It feels good, and it overrides the moral brakes in your brain. Anger drives hate-filled cops as well as justified protests. It’s a way to feel powerful in the moment, to feel in control of things that they have no control over.

That makes it doubly dangerous. Not only does it mean you lose control and do things beyond your own moral framework, but it’s gives you the delusion that you’ve already achieved something. Protestors throwing rocks today will have no more power tomorrow than they had yesterday, but get a sense of accomplishment. They feel like they’ve already made a difference.

Getting off social media

Related to all this: Inspired by a conversation with Phil Gyford I’ve set myself the task of writing something on how to remove yourself from Facebook while preserving the benefits of Facebook.

Technically, of course, it’s easy. There’s plenty of platforms which deliver the functionality of Facebook in a more open and ethical way. The challenge is actually discoverability.

The one unalloyed good that Facebook has brought to my life is that it’s genuinely brought me closer to my family. When your parents are alive, they’re often the glue that binds together you and your relatives. They tell you what’s going on, they keep track of who is where, and who has done what to whom. Then they die, and that bond with the extend family vanishes.

Facebook lets you preserve those bonds, but also makes it easier to rediscover them. Without Facebook, I wouldn’t be in touch with my Aunt Shiela, my dad’s last remaining sibling, who lives in Cypress. I wouldn’t be in touch with so many of my cousins, who prior to everyone being on Facebook I wouldn’t have known how to contact. And none of them would have been able to find me, either.

So the real issue with replacing Facebook isn’t “how do you remake the experience” but “how do you make yourself as easily discoverable”? That’s a much harder one to crack.

Things I’ve been reading

These examples of early computing design are almost heart breaking for me. Machines like the PET had the promise of science fiction about them.

The early days of home computing – in pictures | Technology | The Guardian

Nearly Half Of The Twitter Accounts Discussing ‘Reopening America’ May Be Bots - there isn’t much doubt in my mind that social media is, on balance, bad for democracy.

Link

I'm fascinated by Ian Schrager - from Studio 54 to basically inventing boutique hotels, via a spell in prison.

Ian Schrager Is Still Creating Buzz - The New York Times

I've noticed these meeting notes generated by AI creeping into Outlook at work. One of Microsoft and Google’s key words when talking about AI is “useful” - think of Google calling the Pixel 4 “the most useful phone”.

Meeting Insights: Contextual assistance for everyone - Microsoft Research

Unsurprisingly, this had the MAGA crowd foaming at the gills, and even drew a tweet from El Presidents himself.

Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President - The Atlantic

“What I was hired to do was to create a 21st-century media company,” Lynch told me in his glass-enclosed office on Condé’s new executive floor, once the company’s dedicated gallery space. “Part of that is defining what that means, because they don’t really exist yet.”

Condé Nast’s Future Under Anna Wintour and Roger Lynch

Oh Vice.

Vice Media Was Built on a Bluff