On Blogs & Newsletters & Content

or, thoughts on consolidating your internet life

Before we begin, very important announcement: I am drinking eggnog. It is now officially Christmas season.

Perhaps you live on the planet Neptune and have been far too engrossed in the drama between Mme. Pilgrix Meflmlork at the Skurzzzzz Awards1 to see that Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion dollars a week ago. Judging by his behavior since the purchase, he seems to be attempting to keep the ship he sank afloat by tossing weight overboard in the form of Twitter employees, while also asking Stephen King what he thinks about charging $8 for verification, thus completely obliterating the concept of verification. He is the capitalist version of Donald Trump; a grifter, in other words, who flounders when actually put in the hot seat. Thankfully, Elon’s decisions with Twitter do not impact actual Americans/people of the world like the ones Trump made. His other companies, on the other hand….

I joined Twitter in 2008 and long story short, I liked it. It was the perfect spot for writers, a place that felt like a chat room except it was more like a bunch of people shouting into a collective pot to make a “word stew” that other people could eat from if they wished. Twitter was especially fun before News came and fucked everything up. The moment people realized that they could get millions of views disseminating news and information, and then politics, the site became less weird and fun and more “Thank god we can make money off of this now.” That’s the plot, see: find what reels everyone in and then trap them so you can start showing ads at them.2

Recently though, since Elon’s purchase, I deactivated my Twitter account on a whim, for a few reasons which all centered around the purchase and the general response by everyone to the purchase. On both sides were smug assholes, either for or against Elon, and I was just kind of sick of it. Gone was the fun, weird Twitter that I enjoyed posting absolute nonsense on. Trump already ruined that during his presidency, and when he was banned I thought we might return to a bit of silly normalcy. But alas, it was not meant to be, for websites are capital now, and capitalism is anti-fun.

Thus, with the blue bird to my back, I signed up for Mastodon. Mastodon is a more communal social media app which is open source (I think?) and has multiple “instances” which are basically communities. You can sign up for an account at any of these communities but are still able to access the whole “fediverse” as they call it. On paper it seems fine, but the problem is that it feels like a thing on paper and not an actual fun, enjoyable experience. I’ve signed up to this site three separate times (the third being my current), and each time it feels like tech bros talking to other tech bros about the site and how great it is more than anyone actually having fun or interacting with each other in any meaningful way. It’s a reaction to Twitter, which is the inevitable problem; it’s not a thing of its own. It’s a sequel, and we all know that sequels often aren’t as good as the original.

Another issue I have is that people on Mastodon seem to be looking for other people within their network, whatever that may be. Like, geologists looking for geologist communities, for example. Why? Why are you doing that? People’s jobs are not their personalities! You’re turning this into a networking site.

Most recently (read: today) I logged out of Mastodon. It’s just not it. The vibe feels like a LinkedIn Slack channel, not a cool group text thread where no one is really listening to each other but everyone’s saying something funny. Right as I left, people were arguing about the concept and deployment of the Content Warning system (and even attempting to redefine what the letters CW could stand for, instead of Content Warning). It’s just banal chatter to me. Content warnings are great but the discourse was either “All CWs for everything” or “No CWs for everything” and then people of color came by and were like “We’re not putting CWs up for racism, btw,” and white people were like “But that’s what CWs are for,” etc etc etc.

The policing of speech is a difficult one; I definitely want people to feel safe and comfortable where they are online, but I also, truthfully, don’t want to look at every single piece of thing that I write and assess it carefully for any type of content that might trigger any type of person. Maybe that’s the artist in me talking. Some people get triggered by things I wouldn’t consider triggering, while other people aren’t triggered at all by incredibly traumatic things. A lot of people are doing content warning screens on political topics on Mastodon, which I think is what incited the argument in the first place. Are politics triggering? Shouldn’t they be triggering? If you don’t find politics triggering then what’s your deal? So people began to discuss what “CW” could actually mean, especially in the space of a “federated” social media app, where not everyone is receiving the same information all the time, since the whole thing is meant to be decentralized. It’s like … didn’t you guys figure this out years ago? You’re still arguing about it? Sure would be nice if you hired some content management people or something.

In the end, I think there is a lot more nuance to the content warnings discussion than conservatives give a shit about, which sours the whole experience, making it near impossible to come to any sort of concensus on how we should implement them. Honestly, I’m surprised we don’t have AI capable of reading whatever it is you’re writing and cross-referencing the concepts with whatever the reader doesn’t want to read. Instead we just have photo AI stealing base images to make Richard Nixon eating phở in the style of a political cartoon.

Anyway, without Twitter and feeling less-than-good about Mastodon, I decided to restart my blog. Yes, my blog, like a 2000s era technophile. A place where I would write more freely about whatever the hell I wanted. No text limit, no concern about Elon Musk buying my website for $44 billion dollars. (I would sell it, though, if he wanted.) No real concern for readership—hopefully somebody will read it, but I won’t cry if they don’t. Somewhere where I could feel like writing a bit more personally and a bit more concretely, as I had set an app on Twitter to delete my tweets after a month because nothing gets you cancelled-and-then-eventually-rehired-because-you’re-a-white-man faster than a tweet from 2012.

With that in mind comes the obvious question: what do I do with a newsletter? Well, I think I’m going to just put the best two or three blog posts in here, gussy them up a bit, and post ‘em. That way if you’re not into reading blog posts, you can read a couple of my insights and be done with me. Otherwise, things will be the same. In fact, I’m hoping to get a podcast episode up by the end of the week; I’ve been surprisingly busy with stuff this week!

That’s all. I just wanted to say that I’ve got my blog up and you can go check it out if you wish, but instead I went on a diatribe about a meaningless social media app. Whatever. This is MY newsletter!

Thanks for reading!