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How to Blow Up a Timeline

Jan 10, 2024, 10 min read

How to Blow Up a Timeline

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Highlights

  • One of his key insights is what I think of as his theory of group inertia. Groups are hard to form in the first place. Think of how many random Discord communities you were invited into the past few years and how many are still active. “Organization for collective action takes a good deal of time to emerge” observes Olson. (View Highlight)
  • And, despite Twitter’s notoriously slow rate of shipping new features over the years, it eventually offered just enough knobs and dials for its users to wrestle their timelines into a fever dream of cacophonous public discourse that hasn’t been replicated elsewhere. More than any other social network, Twitter was one its users seized control of and crafted into something workable for themselves. To its heaviest and most loyal users, it felt at times like a co-op. Recent events remind is it isn’t. (View Highlight)
  • Twitter may have seemed like an underachieving mess before, but its structure, built up piece by piece by users following, unfollowing, liking, muting, and blocking over years and years in a continuous dialogue with the feed algorithm? That structure had a deceptive but delicate stability. Twitter and its users had assembled a complex but functional community, Jane Jacobs style. Every piece of duct tape and every shim put there by a user had a purpose. It may have been Frankensteinian in its construction, but it was our little monster. (View Highlight)
  • But, conversely, the service seemed to mold itself around the users who stuck with its peculiar vernacular. After all, they were often the ones who came up with it. Olson again:

    Stable societies with unchanged boundaries tend to accumulate more collusions and organizations for collective action over time. (View Highlight)

  • Each of us sits at the center of our Twitter graph like a spider in its web built out of follows and likes, with some empty space made of blocks and mutes. We can sense when the algorithm changes. Something changed. The web feels deadened. I’ve never cared much about the presence or not of a blue check by a user’s name, but I do notice when tweets from people I follow make up a smaller and smaller percentage of my feed. It’s as if neighbors of years moved out from my block overnight, replaced by strangers who all came knocking on my front door carrying not a casserole but a tweetstorm about how to tune my ChatGPT and MidJourney prompts. (View Highlight)
  • With every social network, one of the most important questions is how much information the structure of the graph itself contains. Because Twitter allows one-way following, its graph has always skewed towards expressing at least something about the interests of its users. Unlike on Facebook, I didn’t blindly follow people I knew on Twitter. The Twitter graph, more than most, is an interest graph assembled from a bunch of social graphs standing on each other’s shoulders wearing an interest graph costume. Not perfect, but not nothing. (View Highlight)
  • Here’s another way to think about it. The difference between Twitter and an algorithmic entertainment network like TikTok is that you could fairly quickly reconstitute TikTok even without its current graph because its graph is a much less critical input to its algorithm than the user reactions to any random sequence of videos they’re served. If Twitter had to start over without its graph, on the other hand, it would be dead (which speaks to why Twitter clones like BlueSky which are just Twitter minus the graph and with the same clunky onboarding process seem destined for failure). (View Highlight)
  • In the world of Almost Famous, Instagram would be the social network for the Stillwaters, the Russell Hammonds, the Penny Lanes. Beautiful people, cool people. Twitter was for the uncool, the geeks, the wonks, the wits, the misfits. Twitter was honest and unmerciful, sometimes cruelly so, but at its best it felt like a true friend. (View Highlight)
  • But peak Twitter? That’s an artifact of history now. That golden era of Twitter will always be this collective hallucination we look back on with increasing nostalgia, like alumni of some cult. With the benefit of time, we’ll appreciate how unique it was while forgetting its most toxic dynamics. Twitter was the closest we’ve come to bottling oral culture in written form. (View Highlight)
  • Friends would forward me tweets, and at some point I stopped replying “Oh yeah I saw that one already” because we had all seen all of them already. Twitter was small, but more importantly, it felt small. Users often write about how Twitter felt worse once they exceeded some number of followers, and while there are obvious structural reasons why mass distribution can be unpleasant, one underrated drawback of a mass following was the loss of that sense of speaking to a group of people you mostly knew, if not personally, then through their tweets. (View Highlight)
  • I haven’t churned yet, but at the very least, I’ve asked the bartender to close out my tab. If Twitter’s journey epitomizes the sentimental truism that the real treasure was the friends we made along the way, then the story of its demise will begin the moment we could no longer find those friends on that darkened timeline. (View Highlight)

title: “How to Blow Up a Timeline” author: “Remains of the Day” url: ”https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2023/7/6/how-to-blow-up-a-timeline” date: 2023-12-19 source: reader tags: media/articles

How to Blow Up a Timeline

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

  • One of his key insights is what I think of as his theory of group inertia. Groups are hard to form in the first place. Think of how many random Discord communities you were invited into the past few years and how many are still active. “Organization for collective action takes a good deal of time to emerge” observes Olson. (View Highlight)
  • And, despite Twitter’s notoriously slow rate of shipping new features over the years, it eventually offered just enough knobs and dials for its users to wrestle their timelines into a fever dream of cacophonous public discourse that hasn’t been replicated elsewhere. More than any other social network, Twitter was one its users seized control of and crafted into something workable for themselves. To its heaviest and most loyal users, it felt at times like a co-op. Recent events remind is it isn’t. (View Highlight)
  • Twitter may have seemed like an underachieving mess before, but its structure, built up piece by piece by users following, unfollowing, liking, muting, and blocking over years and years in a continuous dialogue with the feed algorithm? That structure had a deceptive but delicate stability. Twitter and its users had assembled a complex but functional community, Jane Jacobs style. Every piece of duct tape and every shim put there by a user had a purpose. It may have been Frankensteinian in its construction, but it was our little monster. (View Highlight)
  • But, conversely, the service seemed to mold itself around the users who stuck with its peculiar vernacular. After all, they were often the ones who came up with it. Olson again:

    Stable societies with unchanged boundaries tend to accumulate more collusions and organizations for collective action over time. (View Highlight)

  • Each of us sits at the center of our Twitter graph like a spider in its web built out of follows and likes, with some empty space made of blocks and mutes. We can sense when the algorithm changes. Something changed. The web feels deadened. I’ve never cared much about the presence or not of a blue check by a user’s name, but I do notice when tweets from people I follow make up a smaller and smaller percentage of my feed. It’s as if neighbors of years moved out from my block overnight, replaced by strangers who all came knocking on my front door carrying not a casserole but a tweetstorm about how to tune my ChatGPT and MidJourney prompts. (View Highlight)
  • With every social network, one of the most important questions is how much information the structure of the graph itself contains. Because Twitter allows one-way following, its graph has always skewed towards expressing at least something about the interests of its users. Unlike on Facebook, I didn’t blindly follow people I knew on Twitter. The Twitter graph, more than most, is an interest graph assembled from a bunch of social graphs standing on each other’s shoulders wearing an interest graph costume. Not perfect, but not nothing. (View Highlight)
  • Here’s another way to think about it. The difference between Twitter and an algorithmic entertainment network like TikTok is that you could fairly quickly reconstitute TikTok even without its current graph because its graph is a much less critical input to its algorithm than the user reactions to any random sequence of videos they’re served. If Twitter had to start over without its graph, on the other hand, it would be dead (which speaks to why Twitter clones like BlueSky which are just Twitter minus the graph and with the same clunky onboarding process seem destined for failure). (View Highlight)
  • In the world of Almost Famous, Instagram would be the social network for the Stillwaters, the Russell Hammonds, the Penny Lanes. Beautiful people, cool people. Twitter was for the uncool, the geeks, the wonks, the wits, the misfits. Twitter was honest and unmerciful, sometimes cruelly so, but at its best it felt like a true friend. (View Highlight)
  • But peak Twitter? That’s an artifact of history now. That golden era of Twitter will always be this collective hallucination we look back on with increasing nostalgia, like alumni of some cult. With the benefit of time, we’ll appreciate how unique it was while forgetting its most toxic dynamics. Twitter was the closest we’ve come to bottling oral culture in written form. (View Highlight)
  • Friends would forward me tweets, and at some point I stopped replying “Oh yeah I saw that one already” because we had all seen all of them already. Twitter was small, but more importantly, it felt small. Users often write about how Twitter felt worse once they exceeded some number of followers, and while there are obvious structural reasons why mass distribution can be unpleasant, one underrated drawback of a mass following was the loss of that sense of speaking to a group of people you mostly knew, if not personally, then through their tweets. (View Highlight)
  • I haven’t churned yet, but at the very least, I’ve asked the bartender to close out my tab. If Twitter’s journey epitomizes the sentimental truism that the real treasure was the friends we made along the way, then the story of its demise will begin the moment we could no longer find those friends on that darkened timeline. (View Highlight)

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