• he/him

Precision-seeking, but often ridiculous.


dog
@dog

With Twitter maybe probably dying I've been thinking a lot about where social media is and where it's going. The thing that keeps rolling around in my head with trends on Instagram and a broader shift to Tiktok that it feels like we're seeing social media dividing up more between "creators" and the "audience", with most people just consuming. There's probably a lot of reasons why but one of the big ones for me is that those sites demand higher effort. Instagram photography went from normal people sharing casual photos to a predominant aesthetic of carefully staged and edited photos that require skill and professionalism; video takes more time than either text or photos to prepare in general; and Tiktok video editing takes time, skill, effort.

If a social media site's going to be a place where all its users can and do take part, it has to have a room for low-effort posting. And believe me, I'm doing my part


mcc
@mcc

Been thinking about this.

My first real internet homes were chat systems. IRC and Geocities Chat. To me, that sort of online space just makes sense. Somewhere where you dip in, people are hanging out, you know they are there because they are talking. Posting is not only low-effort, it is transient, by design.

I do like making, and getting the opportunity to share, high-effort posts (images, blog content). But what I find it is more effective to make them somewhere there is a community. A long time ago I had a self-hosted blog (still have, but it hasn't updated since 2016). I absolutely could not get anyone to read it. I thought at first I could post on the selfhost blog, then post links on the community sites I used. But consistently this would get less traffic and response than simply inlining my content into the community site itself.

So: High-effort content actually benefits from low-effort content. Without low-effort, "chat" content there is no community, without community there is no one to look at the high-effort content. And of course no one has the energy to be doing high-effort posts all the time, so if you can't mix in the low-effort stuff you won't be hanging out enough on the site to feel like doing something higher-effort for it (unless, as Misty mentions, high-effort posts get "professionalized", which I don't think anyone wants).


Going on a bit of a tangent: The problem is there's a balance. Since dropping Twitter I've found myself using Cohost for "mid-effort" posts and using Mastodon for "chat". I've really liked having somewhere to put higher-effort posts after spending so long in the soup of Twitter. However since I do have that post every other week or so I put some work into, I feel a little mentally pressured against making a lot of quick "chat" posts on Cohost. I have this idea if someone clicks my profile I don't want them to have to scroll back too far before finding the high-effort post. I think I might be doing something irrational here (I do sometimes browse people's profiles, but does anyone else?). But I think there's a version of that mental pressure that exists at the level of a whole site. If everyone sees their timeline moves slowly, they might feel anxious posting a lot of quick chat posts, even if those quick posts are actually more entertaining than longform blogs. (This becomes self-reinforcing, if more people posted chat content then everyone else would be more comfortable posting chat content.) But maybe if the site moves too quick (I don't think Cohost is anywhere close to this line) maybe high-effort stuff can't survive there at all. In other words high-effort posts and low-effort posts both benefit from each other, but each also inhibits the other.

Twitter, I think, hooked me so hard because for a while it made me believe it was a mix of the two modes. The timeline moved quick so you could spam chat content all the time. But the aggressive use of RTs meant high-effort stuff "outlived" low-effort stuff, chat posts dropped off the timeline quickly but high-effort stuff lived on for days or even weeks as it circulated in RTs. Looking back, I'm not sure this ever actually worked. The things that take off on any social media site are really unpredictable and I think any longtime Twitter user has had the frustrating experience of something you put a lot of effort into getting ignored while a lowbrow joke gets RTs for weeks (or the dark form of that, a post being kept alive through hateshares). But Twitter made me think it worked somehow.

I don't know how to fix this, or if there's a way to fix it. Maybe every site just finds a balance between fast/slow that it's comfortable with or it dies. There have been some sites that had technical or structural solutions. Kuro5hin had a distinction between "Articles" and "Diaries", two channels, one fast one slow. Some sites effectively use "posts" for high-effort content and "comments" for chat. Cohost I've been using #AndiBlogs and #AndiBlogsMini to organize my higher-effort posts, and it does have that feature where you can pin multiple posts. But again my struggle with Cohost has been (as someone who never used Tumblr and is not used to its format) convincing myself to make more low-effort content rather than showcasing the high-effort content...


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in reply to @dog's post:

Funny, this is also where my head's been at! For me, it's not the quality of posts, per se, but the format's perceived expectation of length. "I don't feel that I want to write at-length on anything, therefore I won't post." Completely mental hurdle!

FWIW if anything it's lower stakes to post random things on here in my experience -- people are way less entitled here so far

not to dismiss your concerns, more to go "if you haven't tried yet, it might not be as bad as you fear"

By contrast, I feel that kind of pressure on Bird Site itself. I think the way to resolve this is Twitter's leadership wants it both ways: they want the stakes to feel high enough that you feel COMPELLED to post on every little thing, but also insignificant enough for you to let your guard down and tweet out every unmediated thought of yours on a regular basis. In other words, it's definitely a cultural/platform-related phenomenon...except I'm not completely sure how you'd go about generalizing any of this? Where does Tumblr - quirky Twitter, to extend what I just said - fit into all this? Or Cohost (Tumblr for people who understand CSS), or Mastodon (Twitter for people who understand SQL? Hell if I know)?

Then again, I'm feeling that pressure as I write this post, so some of it is absolutely personal.

Yeah, I feel ya... there are indeed times when I don't feel smart or popular enough to post on $BIRDSITE either. I think simply by virtue of my being there for... jeez... 13 years now... that I feel way more comfortable there. I hope I can get over my fears here! :3

First, I want to say that I agree that social media is shifting into establishing creators and audiences on their platforms. This is pretty clear as websites have shifted into platforms where audiences are built around content and then the creator can use that audience as a customer base (merch, advertisements, endorsements etc). However (and I'm not taking this up with you or this post specifically, I'd just like to leave it in a comment) I've seen this arms race of content quality as going hand in hand with people building a brand, rather than being tied with people putting in effort. I can put time and effort into posts, but that doesn't mean that they're going to be good or connect with anyone.

This has been my issue with Cohost; there is little room for that. It's heavily webdev and tech focused, with the "low effort posts" being in-jokes for people in that arena. It hasn't been a great place for the rest of us to be ourselves and expend that low effort in any way meaningful.

It's interesting, you have a very different cohost experience from me but I think that's also valid!

Personally I feel like the "tech person" contingent was more concentrated back when CSS posting was at its height, but at this point my timeline is quite a bit more diverse.

I agree with this and honestly have not really found anywhere that offers me what I really want which is like twitter/instagram/tumblr from from 5+ years ago. I love seeing mostly unstaged photos of people's day to day or the trips that they're on, shit posts, updates, goofy thoughts, etc. Right now my life is high effort enough I'm not logging on to put in the work but just to feel connected and chill out.

I don't really see this kind of stuff anywhere anymore and things just feel kind of cold and lonely. I sense that things are becoming more private (discords, group chats) and moving faster (instagram stories) but I really miss a slow, low key social feed.

this is me! it's also why I'm really enjoying this site while it's still relatively small, but hopefully it can keep a similar feel as the site grows if I keep a small enough number of nice mutuals

i think the trend is only beginning and the division between "high effort" internet and "low effort" internet is a good thing. the way i see it, its more of a divide between "i have something worth sharing with the entire world" and "i have something worth sharing to my friends or family" and apps like bereal show a demand for the lowest possible effort posting but that kind of content is only valued by people that already really know you.

I personally like the feeling of browsing through a social media feed like a hunt for a good meme to drop in the groupchat/discord for my immediate social group to actually interact with.

I want my friends to send me "hey look at this grilled cheese i made" at 3am and its taken with phone flash.

I want ~influencers~ to show me polished thoughts and products that are worth the time i have to give to strangers to see them.

Now, that said, cohost just needs CONTENT right now in general so go fucking nuts.

this comment in particular makes me wish cohost had a way to re-share comments as top-level posts.

partly to help build inertia behind a thread of particularly interesting discussion (high effort), but also partly because i want more people to see toilet jokes (low effort?)

Social media sites really overstepped their bounds in their relationship with creators when they started demanding content specifically in their format and suiting their algorithms--which of course change often--just to let us promote. Technically they were always doing it, but it started to feel way more grimy recently. Like each one was a separate job if you wanted to succeed. Personally can't wait for the current lineup to croak

in reply to @mcc's post:

How I miss IRC, Discord seems to be the modern equivalent of that. But it is not the same. There are multiple chats, the system tracks where you left off.

And the availability of having it in your pocket makes it feel like you just can't hop in and out like you could with IRC.

I don't know if there is any low-effort place like that on-line anymore... So, weird that when I was young with nothing but time there was no place to high effort posting that I could then sustain. Now that I'm older there's no place for low effort...

Your thoughts on chat rooms being transient by design match our own. We think there do need to be different kinds of spaces for different kinds of thing, as you suggest, but we'd personally like the balance to be more towards the ephemeral stuff.

We personally believe that one of the big reasons large platforms took over was that they're good for discovering important things from further away in the social graph. Therefore, we've been chewing on ways to make discovery work better with an ephemeral substrate.

I'm strongly agreeing with this one too. Balance is good - I haven't had anywhere for high-effort posts for a while, and as a result I've completely lost my ability to make them in coherent ways. But there's also not a lot that matches the low-effort conversational nature either. And, high effort posts do make discovering others more difficult, because low-effort posting is actually extremely conducive for community building.

It's a difficult line to walk. Hard to know exactly how it'll shake out.

maybe one can use the "page" thing for having a slow and fast timeline

i get it though, most of the time i default to posting on the site with the musky smell because it feels like a chatty shitpost would be less welcome here compared to there