I’ve written before about the horrendous algorithm at the core of every social media platform‘s “engagement” algorithm. They align political posts with human posters, on an incredibly ignorant and stupid single dimension, based on American 2 parties, with left (Democrat) and right (Republican) steps. In Facebook you used to even be able to see this – but they’ve hidden it all now. In the old days, you could have people who were anti-abortion, and anti-gun (but only motivated to vote on one or the other). These days, those idiotic sorting algorithms are so good a sorting posts and people to match everything and everyone against that single measure, that they effectively propagate uniformity among 2 opposing, and increasingly extreme sides.
It’s maddeningly simple to understand and explain (1 short paragraph,) and would have taken almost no effort to fix back then – except now, the problem is exacerbated by LLMs and other AIs having been trained on this nonsense. Now AI sorts people in to the same 2 extreme camps, except we can’t actually fix it any more, because even the people who make this slop, don’t understand how it makes decisions.
So – we are utterly screwed, when it comes to these anti-social platforms (to be clear- that’s Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram, most especially TikTok, even YouTube, etc.) The only real way to fix it, is to divest – to just stop using those hateful platforms.
In that vein, I’ve jumped out of medium, back to the old web 1.0 model of hosting my own blog. I’m also in the process of trying to break away from all the centrally planned hosted “web 2.0” platforms, and more toward decentralized platforms. Roughly, that means:
Medium -> unfocus.com (a simple blog)
Facebook/Twitter -> mastodon (social.unfocus.com) – https://unfocus.com/@kevin
Discord/Slack/etc. -> Matrix (a synapse server) for private messages – @kevin:unfocus.com
I don’t quite have an answer to the finance half of this. One of the things that those Web 2.0 things can do reasonably well is create a financial structure, where you can actually get paid for your contribution, with varying levels of success, and more than a bit of abuse. YouTube most especially has a decent (but not great) model, though Alphabet/Google are doing what they can to mess it all up. Twitch and Medium have this, TikTok to a very very limited extent. We don’t have an alternative to that that I’m aware of, just yet, but I felt the need to get started anyway. But even there, those web 2.0 financial transactions are really a subversion of essential capitalism.
However you feel about that word these days, capitalism generally has at it’s core 2 aspects – profit motive for making things (over rent) and open markets (not free markets, they don’t exist, have never existed, and will never exist – markets are man made, authority regulated social instruments.) A double sided algorithm driven faux-market, where a rent seeking middle man, controls what the suppliers get paid, and what the buyers pay – and controls both not through markets, but through algorithms, is in no way capitalism. It is rent over profit, and it there is no real market.
Those of you who like capitalism really should be paying attention to these changes. Those of you who criticize the current system as capitalism, should also pay attention. We don’t have capitalism anymore. That’s why Tesla, for one example, doesn’t need profit to keep it’s stock value high. (See Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis if you’d like to learn more.)
(There’s an argument that this is just a rentier form of capitalism – or that it’s just plain bad regulation. I don’t buy the former argument, but the latter, sure – maybe. It’s possible it just all collapses under the weight of its own nonsense.)
Anyway, I chose these specific platforms for the following reasons:
WordPress for unfocus.com – honestly, I just had a lot of history with WordPress, and an old blog with old posts, and it’s just kind of easy to use. I did replace it with an alternative for a couple of months, but it was too much. Despite the nonsense going on with the owner of WordPress.com, it’s still an easy to use, backward compatible, and mostly stable platform, with a rich ecosystem of themes and plugins.
Matrix for chat – Matrix/Synapse has a bunch of different servers and implementations, is decentralized, and it uses e2e – end to end encryption, for chats. I’m not some super privacy nut – but I’m tired of corporate data mining, grabbing everything they can, including private conversations, and turning that in to ads. So e2e is the way.
Mastodon for socials. Mastodon is an interesting mix of Facebook’s private posts, with Twitter’s public posts, and it’s decentralized. Bluesky does something similar, and I did consider it. But at the end of the day, it’s still algorithm driven, and measured by “engagement” which means it has all the wrong incentives. Mastodon is decentralized in a cleaner way, and it’s feed is just based based on who you followed, in the order they post, not based on “engagement.” This lines up better with what I’m after. Bluesky does let end users manage and even define their own algorithms, so it’s not off the table, and I do respect what they are at least trying to do, more than any of the manipulative ad driven monstrosities. So, Mastodon for now, maybe Bluesky one day. We’ll see. (It was also a lot easier to self host Mastodon.)
Over time, I intend to get away from the centrally hosted, algorithm driven anti-social machines. The internet used to be fun and productive. We made the wrong move with web 2.0. Maybe there’s a way to go one step back, to take two steps forward.
Update: I deleted my old twitter/x account @touvan. If you see posts there in the future, it’s not me.