In the preamble to his Morose thoughts at the Semiquincentennial, @ReaderJohn notes:
I’m on a social medium (I refuse to abuse the plural “media”) with an astonishing number of people, many of them decades younger than me, who manage, without coming across as idiots (au contraire: I’m struck by how many there make me feel unobservant and thick-skulled about what I do observe), to focus on positive, and personal, and local things. Kudos to its designer, who consciously designed it that way (I’m not sure how, except that one never knows how many people follow him or her, and there are no buttons to simply “like” a post).
That last parenthetical is, I believe, exactly the reason why micro.blog turned out the way it did. My first thought was that it filtered out people who liked to see numbers go up — many of them not of the clearest mind — right at the outset. But that is not all there is to it, probably not even the most important part. The intentional lack of statistics cuts the feedback loops which tend to make some people into complete assholes, and every person into an occasional asshole. [Note: Or at the very least an asshole-appearing online presence, but to the exposed person — meaning you, dear reader — there is no difference. ]
Every popularity contest will reward the extremes. This is why I gave up following the Bear Blog Discovery feed. Random posts from to-me unknown authors just popping into my RSS reader [Note: These days a combination of the [Inkwell][4] Android app on my Daylight tablet and my own homebrewed [Inkling for Emacs][5], which is where I’m writing this! ] reminded me too much of Twitter’s algorithms, and even Bubbles — posts from 5,000+ independent blogs, including this one, ranked by timeliness and popularity — favors criticism of AI and tech in general combined with outrage/despondence/resignation towards news of the day/breakage of everyday life/civilizational decline. The only ever Infinite Regress post that ended up on the Bubbles front page fits right in. [Note: A kind reader even uploaded it to Hacker News, where it — thankfully! — received just 4 upvotes and no comments. Small mercies. ] It is, in that sense, no different from Reddit: the medium (of voting) is the message.
Incidentally, these Bubbles and Hacker News and Kagi Small Web and indieblog.page and ooh.directory visitors all leave footprints on this here web site’s Tinylytics dashboard, which has become delightfully uninterpretable owing to the influx in the past few months of what I can only assume are digital ghosts from Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Mexico, in that order. An unexpected benefit of LLM crawlers.
There is something about numbers that makes people’s brains stop working. This is common in medicine, where reflexively treating a lab abnormality without thinking an iota about the patient or even about the ground truth — is this number here “real” or is it a blood collection/lab analysis/data entry error? — is a phase most doctors go through and some never leave. Call it video game brain: confusing the hardcoded information of an RPG stat or a FPS health bar with more malleable values we get from physical measurements.
Well, I know enough about myself not to expect an effortless change in behavior. The effort tank being depleted daily by issues more pressing, I avoid having to interpret these numerical tricksters in any way I can. You see, for feedback to be of any use there has to be effort somewhere and by making leaving it effortless (thumbs up or down? how good was our service from 1 to 10? the text field is optional!) we have made interpreting it seemingly straightforward but in fact harder. Did someone “like” a blog post because reading it was a life-changing experience? Slightly more amusing than the cat photo just below? A toilet seat mistap? Or was it herding?
Now think about all those feedback surveys you started filling because the first page was a deceptive 1–10 scale only to abandon it because page 2 had five large fields for free text, all with a mandatory character count. This puts majority of the cognitive effort on the feedback provider; reading it does take more time than glancing at a number, but the receiver can quickly and effortlessly tell whether it is a) from someone whose opinion they care about and b) what the said opinion is.
So yes this is a long-winded way to nudge you towards writing more emails. Or leaving more comments. Or even starting your own blog. More words, fewer numbers, please. And yes, yes, I am aware how silly asking for more words sounds in these, our Days of Slop. But to go back to the blog post that started all this, and then two links deep to a most brilliant text from Sam Kriss: when everyone from your middle manager bosses to Guardian journalists to prize-winning authors and random tech folk debase themselves with AI, the value of the human-written word does in fact go up.