If you’ve had a period of basically dissociating from a hard time of your life, you’ll know that doing even the littlest thing that has an effect in the real world vs on a screen can be so profound. Something as little as you doing a favor for someone, or someone noticing something about you that you didn’t think anyone would even pick up on bc your brain is all messed up about being perceived. Your living footprint is all muddied and murky. It takes a lot to even feel like you’re inhibiting your body. So consequences that come as a direct result of you just living, whether big or small, blow you away on an inexplicable level
if you’ve ever lived an isolated life, knowing that you’re making a mark in the “real world” can feel so wonderful and strange. you mean i exist, outside of this weird liminal space i inhabit? i get so hungry for that validation. you know my favorite color!!? you think i have a sweet voice?!! you remember that thing i said ages ago!!? because of these seemingly inane things, i get to affirm, again & again, i exist, i exist, i exist. im a real person!! i do things that have consequences!! i won’t disappear off the face of the earth if you remember me in these big & small ways.
This is the Facebook playbook: you lure in publishers by promising them a traffic funnel (“post excerpts and links and we’ll show them to people, including people who never asked to see them”), and then the rug-pull: “Post everything here, don’t link to your own site. Become a commodity supplier to our platform. Abandon all your own ways of making money. Become entirely subject to the whims of our recommendation system.”
Next will be: “We block links to other sites because they might be malicious.”
Then some kind of “pivot to video.”
Probably not video (though who knows?) but some other feature that a major rival has, which Twitter will attempt to defraud its captive, commodified suppliers into financing an entry into.
In case you were wondering, yes, this is canonical enshittification. Lure in business customers (publishers) by offering surpluses (algorithmic recommendation and an ensuing traffic funnel). Lock them in (by capturing their audience and blocking interop and logged-out reading).
Then rug the publishers, clawing back all the surpluses you gave them and more, draining them of all available capital and any margins they have, until they die or bite the bullet and leave.
I would also give good odds on this leading to a revivification of the “Pay us tens of thousands of dollars a month for a platinum checkmark and we’ll actually show what you post to the people who asked to see it.”
That will be pitched as the answer to publishers’ complaints about not wanting to turn themselves into commodity Twitter inputs. It will be priced at the same (or more) as the revenues publishers expect to lose from being commodified, making it a wash.
All of this seems to me to be an “unfair and deceptive business practice” under Sec 5 of the FTC Act.
If I sign up to follow you because I want to see what you post, and Twitter shadowbans your posts unless they are formatted to maximize your dependence on Twitter, they have deceived me, and are being unfair to you.
This is *very* analogous to the Net Neutrality debate, where a platform blocks or deprioritizes the things its users ask to see, based on whether the suppliers of those things are its competitors.
I’ve written about how an end-to-end principle for social media could be enforced under Sec 5 of the FTCA, how it would address this kind of sleazy practice, how it would be easy to administer, and wouldn’t form a barrier to entry for new market entrants:
san diego (12-26yo us residents, not the whole collection just commonly banned books)
these cards (part of the books unbanned initiative) get you access to each library’s complete libby/overdrive collection (unless otherwise mentioned), no hoopla/kanopy/physical copies included.
ebook collections are expensive to maintain (many american libraries have annual fees for non-residents because of this) but because of an uptick in book banning (particularly brutal in mississippi last summer) larger libraries have opened their doors more, which is very kind of them!
i’ve used my seattle card for the last several months and their libby collection has about three times the books that my local library does, which is wonderful for accessing more niche titles or skipping a waiting list. would love to hear of similar ebook initiatives internationally!
i use library extension (firefox/safari/chrome compatible) to check all my collections (+ the internet archive) at once, works for several different countries highly recommend it.
spotify seems to be offering 15hrs/month of audiobook listening to premium subscribers and while that does seem useful if you’re already paying and are after a new release with a long library waitlist, libraries are better for everything else.
fewer posts about “why do straight women date men who hate them” and more posts about “why do so many men hate women that it’s genuinely difficult for straight women to find romantic & sexual intimacy with a man who doesn’t hate them”
this post was written by a trans person & is about misogyny, which affects all women, including trans women. transmisogynists begone, please.
Make peace with where life has placed you right now. Don’t let past hold you back. Don’t let comparison with others’ journey make you question your worth. You’re on right time. You can’t be someone else. You aren’t meant to be! Acceptance help focus on what truly needs attention.
ALT
