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Ethan J. A. Schoonover

Stop thinking of Twitter, TikTok, IG, (et al) as social media sites.

They are **Content Refineries.**

Like processed food manufacturers they take user content & extract the most addicting/engaging content. Brains eat it up but in an unhealthy “devour the whole bag of chips” way.

They make hyper-processed social media junk food.

Mastodon is more like a potluck. We're all bringing dishes. It's a mess. Kids are running all over. But we are, at least, real people sharing real things.

@ethanschoonover wait, you’re telling me devouring the whole bag of chips is a bad thing?

@ethanschoonover I've been on Twitter for twice as long as I've been here and I have never let T “feed me”. I have always used the chrono timeline to see only stuff people I care about have to say. Twitter is flawed in many ways but the algorithmic TL isn't anywhere near the top of my list, because I can switch it off and have nearly the same experience as here (mod advertisements 1 in 20 tweets, but I just don't care).

@steelman @ethanschoonover My thoughts exactly. Pre-Musk Twitter with the chronological timeline was awesome and frankly speaking a much better experience than Mastodon today. The breadth of content was just much wider and search actually works the way one expects it to).

@ethanschoonover Do you think Mastodon will stay this way though?

@gunnarsson i think mastodon will and must grow and change but the fundamental architecture is so different from the monolithic social media services that the outcome can indeed be very different.

@ethanschoonover I am deeply curious how you view Tumblr by this standard...

@EmberLeo i was never a huge tumblr user and still am not. don't have a strong opinion about it

@ethanschoonover There are junk-spreading accounts in Mastodon, too. Just today I noticed one, @science . And as the Fediverse grows, the number will increase.

@tml @science those are bad actor accounts vs the entire system being designed to amplify that. Fediverse has a much better chance of dealing with this kind of junk food than social media services whose whole raison d'etre is the refine it and push it back out.

@ethanschoonover I’ll be the one bringing the green jello ring with little hotdog chunks! Yep. I’m THAT relative. 😂

@ethanschoonover I feel like just about the time twitter went down the tubes, facebook made a huge algorithm change and now I almost exclusively see ads, "suggested for you posts", and other addicting type content. They have me profiled pretty well, but still I miss seeing what's going on with all my facebook friends ... or maybe they've all just quit posting and all that's left to see is ads and boosted content???

@ethanschoonover

Pigeons picking for a reward

@ethanschoonover Twitter has become so toxic that I had to deactivate my account. On Mastodon I feel like I have more control over my feed and I like the interface. I hope Mastodon sticks around. 🤞

@ethanschoonover With the latest AI language and image models Twitter could be showing contents written by robots and we'd barely notice.

@ethanschoonover I feel that Mastodon, and the Fediverse as a whole, is restoring the promise of social networking before Big Social turned it into social media. Meeting people, having discussions, making connections. Very much a potluck!

@ethanschoonover weirdly enough, I've previously likened spending too much of a day on Twitter to eating a whole tube of Pringles. Fun at the time, but feel ashamed and gross afterwards.

@alicemcalicepants @ethanschoonover Addictive but for dopamine instead of glucose, chemicals and salt.

@ethanschoonover you mean I can get cancer if I use it too much?

@ethanschoonover

Great point, we need to get that message out to people.

@ethanschoonover content mines, where people both produce and map-reduce, often by posting screenshots from another content silo; they dont really create, only spread it for the sake of injecting ads

Advertising platforms seems like an appropriate description too

@ethanschoonover cc @pluralistic it goes well with the enshitification evolution of platforms, and social platforms as *content refineries* strikes a chord

@ethanschoonover I like the analogy 👏🏼 And I have tooted and replied to a whole range of topics that were never served up to me at Elon’s 💩 show.

@ethanschoonover this is my only social media account. Because I have a strong resistance to addiction, even my two teens aren’t on social media either. Not even on messenger. They have asked for accounts, but I said no.
Both kids don’t seem to care what their friends think of them.

@ethanschoonover It all starts with semantics. ”Media” and ”social” do not belong in the same sentence. One implies centralized curation and editorial agency, the other does not. You cannot have it both ways, it’s an either-or.

And if you think this is dumb and an oversimplification, look back carefully on what’s been called ”social media” and what hasn’t. Were instant messengers ever ”social media”? Was IRC? Yet were they places where information and opinion spread through social graphs? Yes they were.

@ethanschoonover And both Twitter and Mastodon are potlucks. The difference is, one has a curator pushing the dishes they like down everyone’s throats (and a bouncer throwing some food out), the other does not :)

@ethanschoonover I'd advise staying away from my potluck dish, it's likely full of dog hair 🙄

@ethanschoonover What I want is more tools to discover content I actually want on Mastodon. I don't want to see what some algorithm wants me to see.

@ethanschoonover i've said that for years.. Twitter is just a data plantation, and everybody plantin'

@ethanschoonover
"Am I being farmed?"
Always a good question

@ethanschoonover now I have an urge to eat a whole bag of Doritos 🤣