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- cross-posted to:
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Any citizen of the social internet knows the feeling: that irritable contentiousness, that desire to get into it that seems almost impossible to resist, even though you know you’ve already squandered too many hours and too much emotional energy on pointless internet disputes. If you use Twitter, you may have noticed that at least half the posts seemed intent on making someone—especially you—mad. In his new book, Outrage Machine, the technology researcher Tobias Rose-Stockwell explains that the underlying architecture of the biggest social media platforms is essentially (although, he argues, unintentionally) designed to get under your skin in just this way. The results, unsurprisingly, have been bad for our sanity, our culture, and our politics.
On this topic, an increasingly popular one as the social media economy convulses in response to Twitter’s Elonification, the preferred tone is either stern jeremiad or, for the well and truly addicted commentator (usually a journalist), a sort of punch-drunk nihilism much like that of someone who declares he’ll never quit smoking even though it’s going to kill him. Rose-Stockwell, by contrast, keeps his cool, pointing out that social media is full of “angry, terrible content” that makes our lives worse, while carefully avoiding any sign of partisanship or panic.
It always struck me as kinda insane how much microblogging seemed perfectly designed for all four of those phenomena and yet was widely embraced and loved.
Exactly. 280 characters*, replies being seen without the text that they reply to, the mess that you see when you look at a random hashtag… and perhaps not surprisingly those are things that Mastodon addressed. The difference is blatant - explain something poorly in Mastodon and people will either ignore you or say “what do you mean by that?”; do it in Twitter and you’ll see an angry mob waving pitchforks.
*Thankfully Elon Musk is a moron and inadvertently fixed this, by increasing the character limit. If he knew what he was doing he wouldn’t do it.