Final Task part 3

Here's a mock-up of the Wiggly website

Here's a "video tour"

There's a few things I will expand on.

The number for the amount of people in an instance - 150 - is sort of arbitrary, but based on an idea by a guy called Dunbar. Based on studies on other primates he made an estimation about a "natural" group size for humans as a species. You can read more about it here: Wikipedia - Dunbar's Number. I didn't do any further research than the wiki page so it might be total bullshit, but I needed some number and this one had at least some merit.

We've touched on this topic a few times in class, but it still puzzles me greatly that there's a thing called "YouTube community". There's literally millions of channels, how the f is that a community? When people say that do they mean the creators who move to LA to pursue a career in entertainment? I watch tons and tons of YouTube videos every day and I've never seen any of these videos on any YouTube rewind compilation. It seems really unlikely to me that I would've?

Is this Jennifer Aniston joining "Instagram community"? No. She had a new TV series premiere two weeks after her first post. Her Instagram presence is an ad. Orlando Bloom, Jennifer Aniston and me are not part of the same community now and I cannot comprehend what the comments and likes are for. Is is a status thing to be seen to have liked this post? Is this like getting an autograph? I don't know.

The internet was different before all the real life famous people and everyone's mom joined in, when it was just nerds and kids and everyone visited different sites. In 2004 if Jennifer Aniston had shown up in some random movie forum no one would've cared because it would've been impossible to verify that it's actually her. Content mattered in a different way.

Reddit is my favourite place because it has a nice sense of several communities about it. Different subreddits have different sorts of culture. One of my favourite internet community art pieces of all time is Place, that was a million pixel canvas where every user could place one pixel every 5 minutes. The canvas was active for 72 hours (although the duration wasn't announced in the beginning and probably not planned on either) and during that time plans were made, factions formed, people would take shifts defending pixels. The final image is a product of hundreds of different groups planning things together by themselves - only in the instance of a conflict on the borders of their plans do they need to discuss and compromise and maybe make pacts with other factions further down the canvas. 

Small communities need to exist to make huge group efforts like this possible.

What I want form Reddit is the feel of a small group without in the group needing to be into some same obscure hobby or interest. In a group of 150 random first year students across three universities, I think the diversity of interests and skills would be very high in a given instance, but the common experience of being a student would tie the group together at first.

What I also had in mind was sort of a fraternity. The people in the group would be in each other's group of online buddies, like neighbours in life, helping each other out when possible.

I think a platform in itself doesn't need to be very exciting or give its users everything they want. I think the users should build themselves a place that suits them. Not being able to leave or ban anyone just because you don't like the content of their messages would mean that you have to communicate and solve problems the old fashioned way. I sincerely believe no one would want to be the one lonely troll in a group of 150 people - if you're ignored, no one else outside the group is ever going to see how much you don't care.

I imagine people would take part and strive to create an interesting culture for themselves, playing games they made themselves, create their own stories, write their own reviews and news, make their own music. Who cares if it wouldn't be the best possible content? It would be their own.

Final Task part 2

I gave my social media the name "wiggly"for several reasons. I wanted something short, pronounceable, and something that wouldn't make you think of anything else. There's a decade old concept for an open-source social media platform that is named Diaspora*, and I think the name's rather unfortunate because it's not neutral enough. I googled "wiggly" and nothing of note came up. wiggly.com has been "coming soon" for the past 10 years so that's out, but wiggly.dog was available and that feels memorable and fun.

One of the core mechanics of the wiggly platform is the weekly cycle of creating, curating and erasing. So like read it -> reddit, weekly -> wiggly. The tilde sign would be used in place of an @ sign to indicate users.

An instance is a group of randomly selected 150 people with tuni e-mail addresses to skew the userbase young and educated, to verify they are actual people and to make the some more local and thus more relevant. For the first 30 000 people, the groups would be all mixed up, but starting from next semester the groups would usually be first year students, just from different campuses and majors.

These groups of 150 would be called instances. You could think of it like a private group on Facebook, or a subreddit.

There's one chatroom for all of the 150 users. Instant messaging is impossible.

Every week, a group of 10 moderators will be chosen from the instance at random. Their mission is to curate content created by the instance users for the newsletter (published at the end of the week), keep the peace and act as support between the users and admins of the whole system, if technical issues come up.

Every user has their own page - like a blog of sorts - where they can post whatever they want. Hashtags are an important part of the site functionality, because the users would in time build their own hashtags for threads that continue from week to week, so everyone can find the people and discussions they want.

Everyone is anonymous every week, their username a random number between 100-999 that changes weekly. You can find a specific users post with searching with the tilde sign, and posts about them with the hashtag. Anyone can use any hashtags they want to mark their posts.

Posts could be tagged to be either meant for public discourse (to be possible included in the newsletter) or for only the instance to see. The moderators would be assumed to respect these hashtags. The chatroom could be used to direct attention to longer posts on the blog.

Every newsletter would have the mod teams chosen content about things that they felt were most relevant to the instance that week. These are all public for everyone, and in their own instances people could and would discuss the things they saw in other groups' newsletters.

Even though everyone has weekly anonymity, the people in the group don't change. Eventually you would probably figure out people in your group - no rules about this would be set, and different instances could form their own culture about it. Maybe some would often meet each other in real life. Maybe some would value their anonymity more highly. Once you've outed yourself, everyone will always know that you are in the group. There is a possibility to request to swap groups with someone though, so no one could ever be certain that someone who was in the group a year ago would still be in it. Swaps would be somehow limited though - maybe one person could leave change a month.

The amount of privacy about separating an online presence from your physical one might feel overboard, but it's mainly a countermeasure to avoid hierarchies, as much as possible. Everyone has the ability to start over every week, and if some week you want to post content that you don't want to tie to yourself, then that's possible.

I'll probably continue this a bit after I get some sleep...

Final Task part 1

I sort of lost focus/ got carried away with my presentation so I'll... try to go over it here.I'll go over some problems I have with current popular forms of social media and think about what sort of social media I'd consider fun to be involved in.

My first idea for a final task was to make an Instagram channel for a dog that doesn't exist. I use a lot of time thinking about social media and Instagram is the one that I use most . I don't post much though, and thought this could work as practice and a study of trying to get followers. I wasn't planning on getting any followers, just going through the motions and pretending that I might have them at some point. Basically playing a character, like everyone else.

Social media causes me anxiety. It's just normal social anxiety, but like, digital. I have a lot of neurotic thinking and in the digital realm it manifests just the same as everywhere else - as fears of destroying my or someone else's life by doing something stupid. It's been hard to post anything for some years because I'm too uncertain to press "send", and every time the machine asks me if I'm sure I want to - I'm never sure.

So what's the worst thing that could happen?

Well, you could be bullied and in danger of losing your job for one completely on-brand tweet. Lindsay Ellis made a speech in XOXO festival about how she was targeted by alt right trolls on Twitter for a year and what sort of effects it had on her personal and professional life. No one can just "go offline" anymore. If your job is online, that's where you've got to be.

I use Reddit as much or even more than I use Instagram, but I don't count it as a social media. It's much closer to a forum, and it's mostly anonymous. It's one of those places that you can actually leave and start over. Sure you'll lose your karma, but following doesn't exist in the same way as in other social medias.

One of my favorite subreddits on Reddit is r/hobbydrama - it contains interesting, long posts on niche subjects that I don't know much about, and it's usually entertaining as well as informative. It brings together everything I love and hate about internet communities and culture. Often the drama involves an online community completely imploding due to some controversy involving one person, people take sides and factions form.

Here's a post that's "2 days ago" today:

That's just the start, it's a long post. So basically some 19-year-old had a lighthearted Tumblr account about fish-related memes that got somewhat successful and now his real name will forever bring up hits about these thousands of people trying to goad him into committing suicide because they heard someone say he's a pedophile. It's an interesting read. The power of a mob is insane, and the mob has no morals, it just wants to be entertained. I understand that. I want to be entertained too. But the sheer injustice and unpredictability of it all is frightening as hell. What did user i-am-a-fish do to inspire all this hate? The going theory is that he wasn't negative enough about asexuals.

Why do people share this sort of information and use hours and hours debating about it? Boredom, I guess. I think at this point it's also fear. If you don't take a firm stand that is later on decided to have been the right one, that will be used against you in the future. You're either with us or against us, so what does it even matter what happens to be the truth, if you don't react in the right way quickly enough, you're on the wrong side.

People can't be reasonable because of the bad faith actors who spread information for the purpose of causing harm. Lindsay Ellis gets nazis because she has leftist views, so it's in their interests to try to deplatform her. So the nazis do everything they can to make something stick, and all those on "Ellis's side" are ready to jump ship on a moment's notice so that they won't get canceled by association.

 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-the-retweet-ruined-the-internet

So that would be my problem number one. Information is made instantly available and never taken back, spread in minutes before verified - so no one cares about verification. Constant reacting. Reacting and spreading information gets easier when you don't have to use actual humans for it, so you can build an army of bots to do your bidding. This is also a tactic you can use when you don't care about morals, because there's the idea that this is the "wrong" way to use social media.

 So these are what I think of as "griefer" problems - people making things less fun for others on purpose. I consider many old people griefers because the have all the time in the world to be angry online, but they may lack the desire to learn new things and educate themselves. They'll have an idea of a moment in past that was better, and the only thing they're interested in doing is constantly complaining about others moving on from that point.

Yes, I know. My sun sign is Boomer...

That's The Guardian. The text on yellow is a countermeasure to prevent one of the most common ways of spreading of false news - linking old articles. Periodically all the old news articles about, for example, crimes committed my an immigrant, will start going around again, whenever a vote is needed one way or another. For certain people it doesn't matter why the story is circling again, it's true, after all.

This leads us to my third problem - time. More specifically, time stamps. Time on the internet is pretty hard because everyone's living on a different timezone. The common design decision appears to be to show timestamps as "30 minutes ago". Now the problem I have with this that whenever a screenshot is taken or the post is archived as a picture, it doesn't show accurate time. After a year reddit timestamps have an accuracy of one year - so a post made in in December and April of 2018 will show show up the same way. You can see the accurate time on posts by hovering over the stamp with a mouse but that doesn't work on many, many third party apps. Why is this a problem? Well I HATE IT. I want to know when something happened, because the exact moment it was written in matters a lot.

Tumblr is the worst offender because by default they don't show timestamps AT ALL. That's insane! 

 

Here's a picture from Tumblr's announcement that they're changing the design of how reblogs look like, in 2015. Before that everything was atrocious and impossible to comprehend. (Could be that my unwillingness to join makes it look more confusing to me because I never learned the mechanics from within - but time moves forward, people will forget - and in a few years that picture on the left will be very puzzling to many people.)

And pictures will be all we have at some point, because it's completely opposite from what we were warned about as kids - everything on the internet will disappear forever. The Internet Archive is amazing for saving some of it for now, but it doesn't take much to destroy one non-profit. When Internet Archive and Wikipedia are taken over it's probably time to go off the grid.

So, time! But because timezones fuck things up a bit, we're committing to just the one. Finland time for everyone!

Now - the last few important things that I want my social media to have. I want fun, and I want relevance, and I want to have trust that users will engage with each other in good faith. There has to be a level of privacy between completely open for everyone, and completely private just for you. (In the current media landscape no one can assume that the things they share only with a chosen group of people will stay within that group of people - it only needs one of those people to disagree with you for all of your secrets to be out.)
 
People have to be free to be creative without worrying about things like copyright or if their content is "on brand". Also - not everything in the world needs to be turned into money the moment people like it. Liking can be measured by simply what becomes common culture and what doesn't.

Any sort of "liking", voting to curate content, is just a way to solve a problem of communities getting too big to be curated by hand. A community doesn't NEED to be too big for someone to be able to read everything. A larger community doesn't mean better diversity or quality of content - for example, the biggest subreddits are always rife with reposts, because there's always new people coming in who haven't already seen everything a hundred times. This is how time gets murky, everything mixes up into this disgusting paste of nowness, where everything is always new and old at the same time, everything is news and everything's always been the same.

In next post I'll go over the basic mechanisms of my social media and an idea of how I would want the user experience to be.

Some research goes absolutely nowhere

Thoughts on Breakup Movies

In one class we talked about the movies Her and Lost in Translation*, how they are sort of letters from ex lovers to each other. I was reminded of those movies again while watching the movie Marriage Story on Netflix. I feel like every time I google Scarlett Johansson's age she's younger than before, and I joked to my boyfriend that by her next movie I'll be older than her. She's 35 now and in 2003 when Lost In Translation came out she was 17 years old. I saw the movie in theaters and as a teenager assumed she was an adult. After all, her character was married!

Like those aforementioned Scarlett Johansson movies, Marriage Story seems like it was probably largely inspired by a personal experience of the person who wrote and directed the movie. I mean, the divorcing couple are an actress and a director - how could it not be? If you manage to write something that rings this true, maybe you have to mix in a lot of truth about how you yourself are in the world.

In Marriage Story the best thing, I think, is how both of these characters seem like whole people, and they do decisions that make sense for themselves. Neither is the bad guy. They're both extremely frustrating but understandable and lovable, and their relationship makes sense as much as their break up does.

There's a TVTropes page called "Most Writers Are Writers", because... yeah. Basically if everyone wrote about what they know, all stories would have writers in them. (Out of Stephen King's 300 stories maybe a fifth have author characters, and a fifth of those authors have substance abuse problems.) There's also a truth about writers and directors in Hollywood, that Sofia Coppola is an exception - most writers and directors are men, so usually it's just one side of the story we get to hear and it's his.

La La Land, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Her, 500 Days of Summer, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Before Midnight come to mind when thinking about movies about break ups. Incidentally all of them feature an artistic man (often even a writer), in a relationship with some extraordinary woman who dumps them to pursue her own goals. (In Before Midnight they don't actually break up, although they discuss it extensively and it's Celine's dissatisfaction with the current state of their relationship that is causing all the drama.)

Marriage Story is the one that states it plainly in the dialogue in the scene where the main characters try to one last time settle their separation between themselves. 

Charlie: We had a great theater company, and a great life where we were.
Nicole: You call that a great life?
Charlie: You know what I mean. I don’t mean we had a great marriage. I mean, life in Brooklyn. Professionally. I don’t know. Honestly, I never considered anything different.
Nicole: Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I mean, I was your wife. You should’ve considered my happiness too.
Charlie: Come on, you were happy. You’ve just decided you weren’t now.
Nicole: The only reason we didn’t live here is because you can’t imagine desires other than your own, unless they’re forced on you.

In real life it's also women who usually instigate break ups. Always after these movies, you could ask "why didn't she stay" - and I'm over here screaming with frustration - "why didn't he just change for her?" He always ends up changing after she dumps him, anyway. She tried! She waited! And still she should've waited and tried some more.

*
I re-watched Lost In Translation some time ago and it hit me just how stupid it is. "Oh when I was in my twenties I was sort of lost, you know. I was absurdly famous and rich and didn't really know what to do with all of this massive amount of resources and talent and connections that I had." We're supposed to feel for Sofia Scarlett Johansson's character, who has everything anyone who could ever dream of and her whole life ahead of her. We're supposed to feel for Bill Murray's character and his middle age crisis while he hits on a teenager and cheats on his wife, as if he didn't have all the choice in the world about how his life has gone and what to do with it from now on. I used to think these characters were so cool.