Jane’s Revenge fans all “can you believe Facebook designated our movement to commit arson against political rivals in service of policy goals a terrorist organization?!?”
Hilarious payoff to the Colin Spacetwinks plotline that moving to Twitter did in fact expose him to people with established positions in ::gestures vaguely but broadly:: but this hasn’t particularly got him anywhere and now he’s mainly a high profile reply guy (who, I assume, still fulminates every so often that comics writers look out for themselves and don’t invite him in to overturn everything), so mostly like a Let’s Player of a guy yelling at the news on TV
Wait, about TikTok and the Depp trial, I just realized…
The Zoomers were in school in the ‘10s. Grew up under “cancel culture”. A girl who manipulates systems of “justice” and “accountability” to get her way is their stock image of a villain.
And with POTC Depp was an icon of childhood memories from the Before Time. Even pretty feminist under the old dispensation, “girls can be swashbuckling heroes too”
And but for as long as they’ve known they know the crybullies are evil, but the Adult World props up their schemes. But TikTok is a Zoomer preserve, they can speak their truth there and it’s accepted, even hegemonic. What a thrill!
The Zoomers have joined the culture war as playable characters and their first move is to drive a stake through the '10s
Facebook drama: I will not be going to Uncle Todd’s dinner tonight because he keeps saying racist stuff ♥️
Twitter drama: I cannot BELIEVE she said a slur 7 years ago. #canceled
TikTok drama: Is Chad Chaddington III ch3ating on Ash-Lindseigh????
Tumblr drama: *unintelligible paragraphs between coochiemonsterfromsesassmestreet and destielsfavoritepony37 (who apparently owns an illegal baby racing company)*
shortly after the introduction of the World Wide Web some clever people said hey, what if instead of lots of different web sites there was just one site, a “portal” if you will, that contained all the news and information and entertainment you might want? and we told those people to fuck off and die because their idea sucked shit, so they went away and added comments and rebranded it as “social media” and we couldn’t get enough of it.
I keep mentioning I was like one of the first 6,000 users of Facebook when it first spread to the Ivy League and a thing to remember is it was originally sorted into distinct communities by campus (first colleges in order of prestige basically, then high schools). So effectively everyone on the network from your perspective was someone you might physically see that day.
“Relationship status” used to be like the killer app, updated regularly cause the users were young, yes, but also because the network was “social” in that it encompassed the set of people who might plausibly become personally significant in your physical life.
30 years ago if the president nominated a Supreme Court Justice that week’s Newsweek would have bits about her basically manufacturing consensus that this person and their history and perspective now mattered
15 years ago I would’ve been reading the Volokh Conspiracy as a group of professionals – with distinct bias and interests such that their writing became informationally denser with regular reading – had for months in advance mulled over who it could be, giving a foundational introduction to most of the possibilities
Today I see it mentioned in tweets that’re mostly trying to advance some greater agenda I have to pay long-term attention to the tweeter or at least their milieu to grok while actually still leaving the first-order effects of that particular jurist fairly opaque
Like I had accepted that Facebook would just borglike reproduce other networks’ functionality, but as like an option on top of the feed I’ve been used to since 2003, but the feed itself seems to have kind of become NextDoor recently
Which probably makes more sense for a general-use social network in 2021 than “by legacy analogy to all your college classmates trapped with you on campus”, really
As I never tire of repeating, I was one of the first 6,000 users of Facebook and in all the time it’s never been as bad for me as people have often made it out as, and I’m increasingly sure it’s because I regularly prune my friends list by going through and asking myself “do I recognize this person as someone in my life”
Like, if you have to click through and look at their profile – oh, that’s Becky’s wife, that guy works at the custom shop, this one all your mutuals are from the hiking group – then no, you don’t.
Y’know reddit seems to have extremely low corporate throw-weight for it’s user size. Also seems more-or-less absent from controversies about recommendation algorithms.
Reddit’s a USENET expy, that’s like the least social user-created internet media can get
A eulogy for Shakesville (posing Melissa McEwan as sympathetically, fundamentally ridiculous) that’s basically a eulogy for web 1.5 and a reminder that life before social media was just the same shit at different scale
