A video I think is very important

I Was Making Things Worse by Hank Green

TL;DW: Hank runs a charity store called good.store that was having a Cyber Monday sale (sadly over now, it seems). He posted about this on Threads1 but it wasn’t getting any traction, so he resorted to responding to ragebait. This was prioritized by the algorithm way more. He is quite rightly pissed about this.

Social media is a genius racket. It’s like smoking but if you had to smoke to read the news. As Hank points out in the video, the companies who run these websites2 know they’re addicting people and spreading misinformation by now. We need to fix this shit.

Some things people have tried

Mastodon

The main advantage Mastodon3 has over corpo4 social media in relation to the video is that there’s no algorithm - it just shows you a chronological feed of things you’re subscribed to. In theory this should solve the problem. Clickbait doesn’t get fast-tracked to the top of your feed.

However, I have been on Mastodon for a while and while it’s definitely nicer than Bluesky (I haven’t used Twitter or Threads so I can’t compare there, but I hear they’re pretty bad) there’s still a tendency for stuff that pisses people off to rise to the top. This is partially because people tend to boost5 things that make them righteously angry, so that kind of stuff is more likely to appear in your feed, and partially because it just feels really good when lots of people interact with your post, so people try to post things they think lots of people will engage with.

I think Mastodon is an imperfect solution to the problems of social media because even without algorithms designed to maximize engagement, the design of these sites is inherently flawed. In replicating the structure of corpo social media, Mastodon has reproduced its problems.

Good-old-fashioned blogs and RSS

Obviously I’m a bit biased here; this is a blog post. But I think there really is something to this format that gets what people want out of social media (novelty aggregation) without all the engagement nonsense. I have no idea how many people read this stuff, and I don’t really care. There’s no fighting in the comments if there are no comments. This is raw uncut Special Administrative Zone Sapporo Ichiban largeposting.

(If you don’t know what RSS is - do you wish you had a feed of everything you wanted to pay attention to in one place, with nothing you didn’t intentionally subscribe to, no manipulative tricks, and no stupid infinite scroll (i.e. how social media should work)? That’s RSS. Personally I use Thunderbird, but it doesn’t matter which reader you pick. For the record, our RSS feed is here.)

Why I still have to use this crap

I’m making a video game. At some point I’ll need to market it if I want to make money so I can make more games. Social media is pretty good for getting lots of eyeballs on things (and knowing how many eyeballs are on something, which is important). I dream of the day I can market a game primarily through this kind of post, but until that day comes I’m still on Bluesky and Tumblr. I don’t really post though. I probably should.

Anyway, you should try RSS.

  1. “Well there’s your first problem…” ↩

  2. I call them this and not “apps” to remind you there is an Internet outside of them. Remember when “surfing the web” was a phrase people used? You can still do that. The rest of the Internet didn’t go away. You can still make a website as well. I did it, and you can too. ↩

  3. Mastodon is part of something called the Fediverse, which is essentially a bunch of different apps that talk to each other. Mastodon is probably the most famous, but there’s also Misskey, Pleroma, Pixelfed, and other ones I’m forgetting and can’t be bothered to look up. Almost all of them are open-source. I can’t really comment on the ones that aren’t Mastodon because I haven’t used them. ↩

  4. We live in cyberpunk now; we should use cyberpunk slang. ↩

  5. Retweet, essentially ↩