It’s been a weird couple days; I keep running into this talking point that “journalists won’t use Mastodon unless we incentivize engagement farming”.
Meanwhile I’m having a *great* experience here, because I use it to— I dunno— actually talk to people and form relationships?
I reject the premise that mastodon isn’t useful for reporters. I think it’s more accurate that modern news orgs use social media in purely extractive ways.
You might get more reporters that way, but you won’t like them.
I think if we’re honest with ourselves, the “service” most reporters provide on social media is entirely self-serving. A one-way firehose of signal boosting and self promotion.
“Look at me! I wrote this story. Click on it!”
And then you ask them a question, or have a correction, and nobody reads it, because Wired doesn’t care about building a community, just reaching a consumer. It’s fire and forget.
We already have a tool for that, it’s RSS. What value does reposting a link here provide?
@Haste I wasn't on Twitter before its downfall, but from what I've heard I got the impression that microblogging was a two-way street with journalists, scientists and 'common' folk.
It probably was more like you are suggesting though. But it does make me wonder if early Twitter really was less self-serving in a way.
@odd I’m not sure. I wasn’t on Twitter in the early days. By the time I got there it already sucked. lol
I did get to experience invite-only Bluesky, but I can’t really comment on it from a reporting standpoint because I only used it to shitpost. Which was very community oriented, but totally devoid of professional value.
Mastodon really is the only place I’ve had any interest in my work and I just assume that’s cause I’m pals with folks that live in Seattle here.
@Haste @odd when twitter was smaller, two way conversation was indeed more common, there was
more a vibe of experimentation and play- and the rules were a bit different than how it is now:
no pictures, no replies, no retweets, no search, and history only could go back about 100 posts.
as soon as retweets, replies and search got added, the vibe got less fun because retweets let dumb throwaway remarks go “viral”, blind replies turned virality into pile ons, and search enabled kiwifarms style analysis of targets
@bri7 @odd I bet the internet itself is also kind of different than back then. I don’t have a base for comparison with twitter but I encountered this recently going back to play WoW.
It’s like.. the sewage we’ve all been wading in has made people more cautious and cynical. So it’s kind of just harder to talk to strangers than it used to be online?
At least, it’s hard to imagine using the internet in some of the ways that used to feel normal.
@Haste @bri7 @odd exactly. Britain's Communications Ministry (Ofcom) recently noticed that folk were using social media less. and moving to private messenger services.
A lot (especially younger women) have had way too many bad experiences to go around "talking to strangers", and I don't think they are going to be flocking to Fedi either - the damage has already been done.
@Haste Could be. I'm pretty nostalgic for the time when search was Webcrawler and Altavista. Don't know if the early internet was as trustworthy as I'd give it credit for now, but at least there were less financial incentives to lie to users.
Now I don't really have the energy to retake the net. I read about the small web and it sounds a lot of fun, but somehow I can't really get the hang of it.
@Haste It is different. It was more fun 2 decades ago. The Internet wasn’t controlled by grifters running scams.
I was talking with a friend about the dead Internet theory, and how it relates to online services, and everything really. Something starts cool, gets popular, reaches the mainstream then dies due to it being overrun by desperate crabs trying to make a dollar in this capitalist hellscape to escape the bucket.
This time, most of the Web is on the backside of the bell curve rather than a single service.
Because there is no way to _know_ who anyone actually *is* in an online enviro now. The only way to be sure who anyone is, online, is to know them irl. Voice, video, images, identity- it can all be easily faked now. The world of posting up yr pic in a gaming or a hobby forum (what's left of them) and making close LD friends is pretty over. Sharing your voice, image and personal life now is just setting yourself up as a target for fraud. Sux, but that is the internet today.
@kitkat_blue @Haste @bri7 @odd
I remember thinking this as I chose my "Forever Handle" for Geocities around 1995. It took me until 2007 apparently to buy mycotropic.com but I've been mycotropic since /area51. What I thought was "this internet thing is awesome but people are going to be assholes to each other forever if it's always anonymous. My thinking was to always use one name and only tell people I wanted who mycotropic is IRL.
Anonymity is what killed Twitter for me amongst other things including doxxing but these days that anonymity is a minor protection given we decided to let fascism run the US.
Fascinating to have watched this develop over time though!
Incidentally, your domain, mycotropic.com comes up as a "suspicious page" with an unmatched security cert. But mycotropic.org does not (if that is also yours idk) Don't know if you care, but you are probably losing visitors because of that.
I've never used it except as an email address, I should probably clean my whole pile of domains up shouldn't I!
Thanks!
Haha! Only if you don't want scary anti-virus notes popping up for your visitors! 😜 And You're very welcome. 😸
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/116358958213462520
@odd @Haste Early and even late Twitter was so much better from what "journalists" do on "social media" now.
Old journalist here. Early Twitter was really good for getting those two-way exchanges that made your reporting stronger. But that didn't last, and being in those spaces became increasingly caustic. I quit FB in 2018 and Twitter in 2021.
But even in the beginning of for-profit social media, you could feel the shift as a journalist--we were unpaid workers for all those walled gardens.
But the problem is, loads of people get their "news" on social media. Journalism is community work, and really good, independent journalism is part of the resistance. But when your community is there looking for news on the for-profit socials, it's a huge problem. Mastodon is one of the few places where people have a little more understanding of this framework and have taken some affirmative steps toward fixing it.
Perhaps it needs to be said: very few people get into journalism because it pays well. I was never paid very much. Most of us believe in the importance of this community work.
Thousands of journalists have been laid off in the past two decades. No one came to help us. But no one working in the business was surprised. The old business model doesn't work anymore. Those remaining know that. Chasing clicks is just the last few drowning men grasping at straws.
@Haste I'm imagining a whole lot of reasons why you could expect better turnaround from social media posts, even if you treat it just like a feed and never reply to anything. Primarily engagement--like my blog probably won't get any attention not only because it sucks but also because there's no way to engage with it. Until I fix that I'm probably wasting time.
I can add comments to my site but that's going to be a new service they have to join or I'm enabling social media commentary.
@Haste I've run into a small handful of reporters and journalists who've done that, along with a few other content creators who... don't really engage with folks but are here to just drop self-promo and that's that.
I don't really mind certain kinds of self-promo (e.g., "I wrote a thing!" or "I made a thing!"), especially when it's nested within genuine interaction or other interesting posts (even if it's shitposting with another person). I love seeing people drop their art (whatever it is) or writing, and it's given me a lot of cool and new perspectives I haven't otherwise found.
But I think if more journalists and reporters actually engaged with people, it might alleviate (not solve) the issue of how a bunch of 'em forgot who they claim they write for and inform. It might even get a few to stop doing disinformation or strong one-sided perspectives of news stories (e.g., when all of their info for a story comes primarily from cops or corporate mouthpieces without further looking into it).
Oo, interesting.
… I want to talk through stuff with people i reasonably trust, with enough variety to have many opinions, with some social norms so disagreements don’t spiral.
That’s both a LOT and something we’ve been doing since language, yesno? I’ve decided that online groups are “easy come easy go” by nature.
I’m still on some old timey forums for specific interests, with more or less “just friends” structure stuck onto them. More blew up. Moderation is hard.
@Haste it’s so much easier for them to negotiate a deal with a central owner of non-federated social media to artificially force their posts into your view.
That doesn’t work here if there is an instance devoted to fire and forget with no community participation I’d personally block it at the instance level.
It’s amazing to me that corporations have positions for social media posters but not necessarily participatory users. It’s all about an initial hook, click and view counts.
I don’t care who sees my posts here some are just into the void. I can be as weird as I want to be. Also I have no relatives that call when I post ambiguous song lyrics worried about my mental health.
good social media is RSS with boosts and replies. I primarily want to follow lots of people who will then surface the best articles so I don't have to subscribe to everyone's RSS feed. and see some discussion.
@Haste Back on 
, I felt like they did provide a service. They cited their own articles, but adversarially to the publications they worked for - poking through the clickbait and bullshit headlines, telling the stories of what they cared about, how they researched the story, etc. that they weren't allowed to do in the actual publication.
Now, all they do is act as mouthpieces for the companies they work for. 🤮
EVHaste
Erwin
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Badri
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derptron
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Olivia Vespera
clew
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