42/ So stop blaming the media platforms for your own wallowing in small-minded Twitter gossip about people. [Train] to the point where you decide whether to be there or elsewhere.

Bluesky is an opportunity to “bring in more physics”, designing in friction on the protocol-level as a proactive way to avoid downstream moderation issues. …we highlight the importance of allowing users to freely “plug in” a moderation filter so that users can see what the resulting content looks like before committing to it. This should include asking ourselves: - Is the team designing the protocol and assessing proposals representative of the people who are most hurt/marginalized by these technologies? - Are the initial clients of the protocol diverse? This shouldn’t be another case of US-based initial clients and the rest of the world follows.

I sent a couple tweets into the aether yesterday after not putting anything out on Twitter for about a month. Maybe it was because I’d just worked out and endorphins were careening through my...

This particular shapeness of twitter mostly pushed me off of it some time ago and whenever I return it always feels like I’m the wrong shape. I don’t really know what to do there anymore; I can’t capture my voice, my dumb jokes, my weirdness in a way that’s satisfying to me. But, right here on this very website I somehow can. Reminds me of how Ryan used to note how odd it is that dating apps. box us all into the same shape, seemingly for the same “legibility” a timeline can afford.

Time is not infinite. None of us can afford to spend what is left of it dallying with the stupid and bland.

Using Twitter the other day, finding myself sucked into a far-off event that truly does not matter, it occurred to me that social media is an orthographic camera.

So the optimal thing for you to do, whether you’re an open source software developer or a Twitter armchair analyst, is to figure out your specialty zone that’s simultaneously useful, but unique – and then homestead it. Establish and cultivate it, like a garden or a plot of land, that you’re tending for the communal benefit of everyone. People come to associate that little plot of land with you specifically, and think of you whenever they go near it.

turns out most people who actually build things are thoughtful and sincere, and very few of them give a single shit about whatever bad takes are circulating VC twitter that day.

The academic journal business model is a funny one, because the journals themselves don’t actually do much work. The content is produced by PIs, for free, who apply for publication in hope of getting selected. Other PIs who review and curate submissions also work for free: it’s considered a part of academic duty, and prestigious to accept but disastrous to decline. In short, aside from the cost of ink and postage, academic journals deal in one thing only: positional scarcity. The real shame in academic publishing, if you ask me, isn’t Elsevier’s 35% profit margin on journal subscriptions. It’s the much larger amount of money, time and influence that is regressively taxed from the young scientists, to the old ones, in exchange for nothing but brand access.

A blog can still stand as a separate place to develop an individual voice. But what if a blog could also exist as a Twitter account of sorts?

The problem is Twitter is supposed to be an interest graph, but really it is just a people graph because you can’t follow interests on Twitter, you follow people.

It feels almost insensitive to focus on anything else right now, like bringing up celebrity gossip at a funeral. ​ This is that emergency episode that falls outside the overarching narrative continuity of our lives. ​ Living in a house where adults are screaming at each other in the next room from dusk until dawn chips away at the membrane of one’s inner peace. ​ More and more of the information is simply adding to the fog of war, and some shoddy graphs of all sorts of really varied data sets and cohorts aren’t helping. ​ For all the chaos on Twitter, some of the smarter voices there still strike me as the most sensible ones.

I think my limit for open-loop writing is about 14k words. For the book on temporality I’m working on now, I’ll probably serialize it online in some form before trying to put it together as a book. ​​ All in all, it was a wonderful outpouring of deep reserves of creativity and knowledge, the likes of which I haven’t seen online in a long time. ​ Twitter is where all the history-making, universe-denting social media action really is. It is as close to a pure ideas-commons/digital public as we’ll ever get. ​ Email today is now less a communications medium than a communications compile target.

A pause...and then I saw him pop up on my screen, eyes warm and crinkling, smiling widely. “Ahhhhh, there you are!” he beamed, clearly thrilled to see me. It made me happy. He was right: it didn’t feel like a proper reunion until we saw each others' faces. ​ My internet friendships look a lot like my IRL friendships, but they lack corporeality, are impossible for me to get my fingers around. When we hang out in person, our offline interactions look a lot like our online ones: talking, analyzing, processing, thinking out loud, asking questions, reflecting, words, words, words. Our brains are directly wired into one another. Our bodily expressions are confined to heart-eyes, wow, angery, cry, or whichever limited faces our messaging apps allow us to make. We blow blue bubbles at each other. We convey our emotions through slang and punctuation, express our love through memes. ​ Robin talks about making a messaging app for his family, with a grand total of four users, and the joy of building things just for yourself, much like a home cook as opposed to a professional chef.

Twice in my life I’ve had the good fortune of getting exactly what I wanted, only to find that, once I had it, it wasn’t what I wanted at all. ​ Twitter, then, is a shared delusion experienced by many millions of people simultaneously. That shared delusion can be wonderful and powerful, which is why it is so difficult to explain to non-participants, but it certainly comes with tradeoffs as well ​ A physicist making a contribution about physics might find a social justice advocate reviewing the contribution for social justice norms; a social justice advocate carelessly drawing a physics metaphor in a social justice contribution might find a physicist explaining technical inconsistencies in the metaphor that was intended to be casual. All happens in front of an audience, driving behavior that might play out differently in public. Participating in this process can be stimulating, but also frustrating or exhausting - it is difficult to foresee the various intersections of “expertise” to which a given contribution might be subjected.

but they are different from social privacy. Social privacy is the expectation that we shouldn’t want to pry into each others’ lives. ​ Defining social privacy in an online context is difficult because it’s not clear what our “public face” really is. Unlike our physical environment, our online world contains layers of our past, present, and future selves, all occupying the same timespace. We are all time travelers, navigating multiple realities at any given moment.

instead of interesting thoughts and aperçus, I find instead a lot of self-promotion, water carrying, awkward efforts to impress people, attempts to @ my way into conversations I didn’t belong in, and lots of stray opinions that would have been better off kept to myself in any circumstances. It’s like I had no concept of a “lane” to stay in. I no longer feel like I need to narrate my entire day’s reading to the site as if it were a surrogate listener. But reading them over as I eliminate them from the public record, I see that there was nothing there, nothing that can redeem for me now the time I spent on the platform in the past. It’s more an illustration of the time I wasted while never trying to write something that might have had the remote chance of actually being lastingly useful. No one on social media is speaking to the future.

This piece reminded me of a [recent addition](https://github.com/jasdev/thoughts/commit/4103afc7ee992e86b52ecfe28b14549ef1287e5a) to my Daily List, “write for yourself and Distillations.” By keeping Twitter usage ephemeral, it might be easier to [keep stock](http://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890) on my own domain.

That’s why my short stuff appears here (and on my microblog) and then gets copied to Twitter. It belongs on the open web first. Twitter is just another form of syndication. It’s not the home of my writing.

I have to confess that Twitter has yielded some good relationships and opportunities over the past few years. And there’s a part of me that wants to keep that portal open. It’s just that on most days, I’m not sure it’s worth it. ​ going indie, as it were, works better (better, I grant, depends on your purposes) when you’ve already got a large audience that is going to follow you where ever you go ​ divided ​ What I do know is that the newsletter is increasingly where I want to write and what I want to keep developing

forget running for office if youve ever tweeted about, like, anything. ​ I cant remember at what point my posts started becoming a liability rather than a rich text of my life.

but jet lag has a way of making even comfortable beds in comfortable neighborhoods seem foreign. There should be a term for this sort of chain reaction of literary progeny: you read a book that forces you to read a book that forces you to read a book, the textual equivalent of a wild night out. but I just want to fade the instinct a little bit, to train myself for more durable content.

“The thing that's so unsettling about it is this feeling of sort of losing control of your own identity as you're immediately forced into a number of glib, competing narratives by people who know nothing about you playing to their audiences.”

Update a gist to contain your latest tweet

The most interesting product of Twitter’s popularity, to me, has been the explosion of Twitter API client software.

[December 21, 2011]

Casey Newton of the Verge spoke with content moderators who are employed by Cognizant but working on Facebook’s behalf: Collectively, the employees described a workplace that is perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos. It is an environment where workers cope by telling dark jokes about committing suicide, then smoke weed during breaks to numb […]

Emoji for everyone. https://twemoji.twitter.com/. Contribute to twitter/twemoji development by creating an account on GitHub.

so many intense and lively twitter debates should just be held in an ephemeral read-only discord channela lot of real-time nuance, dialogue, and clarification are lost in these monster threads— ryan dawidjan (@ryandawidjan) December 7, 2018

i dont think twitter lacks "complex discussions" because of its UX design, but because it's a deeply gamified platform that functions on metrics. only certain discussions are possible when everyone is keeping score https://t.co/MFFrw8FNHx— nathanjurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) February 18, 2019