Social Media Methodology Documentation

[extratone]

108 is going to be an important place to start.

Twitter is the only context where I do not currently see a need for increased emphasis on self-curation at this time considering how that all appearances have indicated that Twitter is algorithmically minimizing my content for specific reasons - I would argue that they were once the same reasons Twitter encouraged.

[extratone]

The Document

• The Gist Shortlink: http://bit.ly/dbfollow

---

There is a limit to how many accounts you can follow on Twitter. It was finally documented in this official help document, dated March 2019, but for more than ten years, it was implemented without any explanation from the service, and was known only to those of us who'd actually encountered it.

Here's what happens when I try to follow a new account from @NeoYokel:

I was only able to verify that this has been the case since October 20th, 2017 - naturally, I didn't bother to note the actual date I first received that notice.

If you're a recent follower of mine and you've found this document, please know that I have seen your expressed desire to keep in touch in some way (which is what following someone "says," I think we can agree,) and have probably responded by adding you to one of my Twitter Lists. You may have received a notification about this, but if you haven't, it's because I have not yet chosen to make the List to which I added you public.

I also want you to know that I am available to speak directly about this if you have questions - whether that be on Twitter, by email, or otherwise. Here's my personal phone number: +1 (573) 823-4380

For whatever it's worth, thanks for the follow. I hope to hear from you but if I don't, thanks okay, too.

[extratone]

• Medium Post https://extratone.medium.com/why-i-didnt-follow-you-back-2fa2b5cd8591

[extratone]

Assumptions in Question

1. For the vast majority of mainstream social users, no amount of [insert vague overused marketing jargon noun] will ever result in a substantial accumulation of money/"influence" (which seems to be the diluted zag of "POWER" of the moment.) Those interested in learning about "marketing" should know that no authority on the subject would ever tell you to start with Twitter - this I can say with certainty.
2. Though Twitter was designed upon certain frameworks with certain rules which form quantifiable formulas where they are dependent upon a user's choices/methodology to produce results which we have, indeed, become more adept at predicting with study over time, it was not created as a game to be won. Perhaps more importantly, the "prize" of "winning" in the sense held by those who resist this assumption (notoriety, "influence," relevance) has continued to prove ultimately worthless (or worse) time and time again throughout the very short history of the cultural element as it exists today.
3. If both 1 and 2 pass scrutiny, the only remaining reasonable prerogatives in one’s social media use is to engage with both strangers and friends in a manner which generally adds value to the lives of all involved.
4. 3 is not only possible - it is easily reproducible. Most of my evidence is centered around my own experiences, but I believe - if I took the time - I would be able to find infinitely many publicly-facing examples.
5. Though I am going to use my own methods to demonstrate 4, neither my ideas nor my behavior are the only means of interacting positively on social media.

[extratone]

"Who Says What to Whom on Twitter" | Web Information Technologies (2011)

• Web page (Archive)
• Original PDF link (from Archive)'
• Backup of the original PDF on this repo
• Attempts to convert the original PDF to HTML, and then to Markdown have been stored in the same directory more or less as they were.

Abstract

We study several longstanding questions in media communications research, in the context of the microblogging service Twitter, regarding the production, flow, and consumption of information. To do so, we exploit a recently introduced feature of Twitter---known as Twitter lists---to distinguish between elite users, by which we mean specifically celebrities, bloggers, and representatives of media outlets and other formal organizations, and ordinary users. Based on this classification, we find a striking concentration of attention on Twitter---roughly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20K elite users---where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed. We also find significant homophily within categories: celebrities listen to celebrities, while bloggers listen to bloggers etc; however, bloggers in general rebroadcast more information than the other categories. Next we re-examine the classical ``two-step flow'' theory of communications, finding considerable support for it on Twitter, but also some interesting differences. Third, we find that URLs broadcast by different categories of users or containing different types of content exhibit systematically different lifespans. And finally, we examine the attention paid by the different user categories to different news topics.

[extratone]

ℙￓℜ: ℙ꒤꒒꒒ ￓꑙ ℜﾼ￡ℜﾼ꒚ꎧ

[extratone]

※ David Blue ※ on Twitter: "I do not understand the mentality of Twitter users who behave as if it is an intraweb competition and/or it has value in and of itself." / Twitter

[extratone]

https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/696094018862718976

Technically, the only feasible route for Twitter continuing in a static format is purchase by government to become a public service.

---

OR, a subscription model. (This would be hugely preferable IMO, but it'll never happen.)

[extratone]

https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/841212000436912129

※ David Blue ※ on Twitter: "the solution to Twitter's financial discombobulation will always be paid premium accounts. https://t.co/dBR6SDbRbE" / Twitter

[extratone]

Old Mastodon Thread of Mine

22-05-2021 10:37

social services are always idyllic in the beginning because the prime majority of original users are genuinely motivated & rewarded enough by socializing to circumvent obscurity and cumbrous experiences.

(so far, Mastodon seems remarkably exempt from the latter.) Edit profile

social services are always idyllic in the beginning because the prime majority of original users are genuinely motivated & rewarded enough by socializing to circumvent obscurity and cumbrous experiences.

(so far, Mastodon seems remarkably exempt from the latter.)

@DavidBlue i think overwatch is a testament that paywall means little to bad behavior

@Gargron in this context, it very well could just result in a stale ecosystem of rich, apathetic assholes with nobody to harm. (shkreli dot social?)

though being responsible for originating a legal model for simultaneously muzzling AND profiting off of trolls would make for one helluva legacy.

@DavidBlue counterpoint: a paywall would exclude many marginalised people, who I would guess disproportionately often feel the need to get away from Twitter

@DavidBlue from my experience in community management for a F2P MMO I think the only solution to toxicity on social media services is solid and reliable moderation with an application of common sense - trying to performance tune it too much will result in LGBTQ+ people getting penalised for just talking about their existence or a nontoxic person for having a sweaty vent, while the nobends will find ways to skirt The Rules

@DavidBlue I meant a sweary vent of course. not a sweaty one.

@theoutrider I was hoping that was some slick figure of speech.

some brilliantly worded insight, there. free-to-play game communities ARE social media, really.

guess we're stuck with humanity until we finally nail that Empathy Algorithm.™

@DavidBlue obviously a community will develop its own standards and encourage them, but the only way to enforce reasonable behaviour is to moderate

which for large communities is very time consuming, which is why socmed services don't like doing it (because it means hiring and training lots of people)

@DavidBlue also from my personal experience from that side of the fence, performance tuning the moderation too much probably results in callcenter-style setups where people just look at reports of people being abusive for eight hours a day under constantly increasing performance pressure

and believe me, that shit takes a toll on you if you're moderating

@DavidBlue it's not an easily-solved problem, moreso in spaces that aren't just text messages - I've read emails from users who had a group of trolls just walking up to them, saying "hello " and then silently following them everywhere in the game and we couldn't do anything because technically the trolls weren't breaking The Rules (and being f2p of course it was just a horde of throwaway accounts)

but Twitter and Facebook really aren't doing a very good job even trying to find a solution

---

==2784== Words

• ※ David Blue ※: "social services are always idyllic in the beginni…" - Mastodon

[extratone]

• Source Code: All the web’s a store

Introducing Your New Favorite Way to Shop: Live Shopping Fridays - About Facebook

[extratone]

[extratone]

I Would Prefer Not To | On the Media | WNYC Studios

'''

'''

[extratone]

'''

I don't understand twitter spaces
Why would you want to talk to anyone

— Mint S. Decot (@mintdecot) May 26, 2021

''' 'https://twitter.com/mintdecot/status/1397611163374997511'

[extratone]

Joe Rogan's "Post and Ghost" method.

[extratone]

Apparently this club - "CH Event Pros" - hosts regular rooms where guests are brought up one by one to speak, where their profiles are evaluated by some vaguely pr-related professional title for their "potential to help them create better Clubhouse events." (Yes, I listened very carefully to make sure I could confidently quote that bit.)

[extratone]

"※ David Blue ※ (@DavidBlue@mastodon.social)"

31-05-2021 03:52

hot toke: there is literally zero artistic reason to create a dystopian culture critique like Handmaiden’s Tale that isn’t specifically written first for those whom you are critiquing.

and honestly very little reason to consume such a thing as a moderate liberal imo. Edit profile

hot toke: there is literally zero artistic reason to create a dystopian culture critique like Handmaiden’s Tale that isn’t specifically written *first* for those whom you are critiquing.

and honestly very little reason to consume such a thing as a moderate liberal imo.

y’all spend so much time bumping up your fear of one another and it just… looks utterly absurd from anywhere with actual gusto lol.

@DavidBlue targeting a media at the group it’s critiquing is a sangerous game as well. you run the risk of people thinking the villains are awesome and emulating them, adopting their speeches into their culture. see every depiction of nazis except The Producers

@zens I think it’s important to continue on that and differentiate: twitter proves there are a lot of people currently doomscrolling on Twitter. it does not prove that people are unable to choose not to do so. I am very tired of folks simply quoting data, tossing off a vaguely self-critical platitude, and always landing on a defeatist note.

(sorry I’m literally writing something on this rn lol)

((that said… I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t.))

---

==1174== Words

• ※ David Blue ※: "hot toke: there is literally zero artistic reason…" - Mastodon

[extratone]

"As Haphazard as Possible" Broadcast (Happs)

https://happs.tv/post/Z41L4vhUprcLuS3fvpBy

• YouTube Result -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvRIGVyW2zM`

<iframe width="720" height="1280" src="https://happs.tv/post/Z41L4vhUprcLuS3fvpBy/embed" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[extratone]

My Happs Fuckup

https://youtu.be/OvRIGVyW2zM?t=576 *576th second, 09:36 timestamp`

<iframe width="315" height="560" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OvRIGVyW2zM?controls=0&amp;start=576" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[extratone]

✨🎋.illu.🎋✨💧🔶️ (@Illumiell):

This is one of the most wholesome things I've seen on Twitter 😭💕 pic.twitter.com/8fTS2wJPXw

[extratone]

SSH IS A FUCKING SOCIAL NETWORK..... OH FUCK

(Tilde.Town)

107, too...

[extratone]

"Introducing Twitter Blue - Twitter’s first-ever subscription offering"

04-06-2021 17:48

Introducing Twitter Blue - Twitter’s first-ever subscription offering. We’ve heard from the people that use Twitter a lot, and we mean a lot, that we don’t always build power features that meet their needs. Well, that’s about to change. We took this feedback to heart, and are developing and iterating upon a solution that will give the people who use Twitter the most what they are looking for: access to exclusive features and perks that will take their experience on Twitter to the next level.

And for those wondering, no, a free Twitter is not going away, and never will. This subscription offering is simply meant to add enhanced and complementary features to the already existing Twitter experience for those who want it.

Meet Twitter Blue

Starting today, we will be rolling out our first iteration of Twitter Blue in Australia and Canada. Our hope with this initial phase is to gain a deeper understanding of what will make your Twitter experience more customized, more expressive, and generally speaking more 🔥. 

Those who sign up for a Twitter Blue subscription will get a set of features and perks that include the following:

This Tweet is unavailable

Bookmark Folders: Want an easy way to better organize your saved content? Bookmark Folders let you organize the Tweets you’ve saved by letting you manage content so when you need it, you can find it easily and efficiently.

This Tweet is unavailable

Undo Tweet: Typo? Forgot to tag someone? Preview and revise your Tweet before it goes live. With Undo Tweet, you can set a customizable timer of up to 30 seconds to click ‘Undo’ before the Tweet, reply, or thread you’ve sent posts to your timeline. Correct mistakes easily by previewing what your Tweet will look like before the world can see it.

This Tweet is unavailable

Reader Mode: Reader Mode provides a more beautiful reading experience by getting rid of the noise. We are making it easier for you to keep up with long threads on Twitter by turning them into easy-to-read text so you can read all the latest content seamlessly.

This Tweet is unavailable

Subscribers will also get access to perks, such as customizable app icons for their device’s home screen and fun color themes for their Twitter app, and will have access to dedicated subscription customer support.

This initial set of features was developed based on feedback we received from our very own power Twitter community:

This Tweet is unavailable

As a Twitter Blue subscriber, you will get these features and perks for the monthly price of $3.49 CAD or $4.49 AUD. We will be listening to feedback and building out even more features and perks for our subscribers over time. As always, we’ll be keeping you updated as we progress right here, so be sure to check back in. 

For those of you in Australia and Canada, get your Tweet on and sign up for Twitter Blue! And be sure to follow @TwitterBlue to keep up to date with the latest and share your feedback. We’ll be listening 👂. 

This Tweet is unavailable

---

==2934== Words

• Introducing Twitter Blue - Twitter’s first-ever subscription offering

[extratone]

Against being a "real" person online - gen yeet

[extratone]

I love my computer because my friends live in it!

Source: https://twitter.com/coolgirl0nline/status/1409429744249040902

[extratone]

Spotify Greenrooms Samples

It is legitimately far more rational to just hangout and talk about Basketball all day than it is to gather like this under the vaguest illusion of financial professional gain.

[extratone]

Regarding Discord's Server Limit

RE: 100 Server Limit

A (two-year-old) reply from !Roberto

My personal reason for wanting this feature

Whilst I may not be consistantly active on all the servers I am a member in concurrently, I do have specific reasons for being in each server beyond the unimportant reason of emoji servers. This if for the same reason I don't limit myself with the number of websites I hold accounts on. I have various topic-realted discords, for eample, for various programming languages, various games I play, and so on. Rather than having to record possibly non-permantant invite links, and only joining servers when they become relevant to me, I would like to retain an archive of servers to access at my liesure.

The neccessity of server catagories, grouping, or folders

In tendem with this feature, it is important to add an organisation feature to allow users to group their servers into catagories. Discords has grown from a small-community gaming-oriented platform to a large social network, and as such, should nolong be limited as so. A user should atleast be ably to have single-level catagories, or, ideally, mmulti-leveld tree-structure catagories. Some example catagories would be, 'Streaming', 'Game', 'Friends', 'Programming', 'Official', 'Partnerships', and, ofcourse, 'Misc.'.

Proposal: decreasing required resources

If the reason for a limit is predominantly client-side lag, I would support removing the limit in favour of adding a warning.

I suppose that, if required to decrease resources used, notifications be limited to the existing server limit, but allow the user to ad servers past that limit. This could possibly be executed by automatically fully muting servers added past the existing server limit, and of course notifiyign the user of this, as well as only allowing a maximum of the currect limit of servers to be unmuted. Additionally considering negation of resources used by fully-muted servers would be important.

[extratone]

Dan Eden's Broadcast

The Write-Only Twitter Client.

• TestFlight Link

[extratone]

well. looks like Facebook has decided to dig out the ole msngr dot com domain specifically for Messenger Rooms. https://msngr.com/jmdvjosbjwfe

[extratone]

"A sci-fi writer got meta about gender. The internet responded by ruining her life."

By Emily VanDerWerff 'Jun 30, 2021 at 07:00'

---

Getty Images/iStockphoto

“In a war zone, it is not safe to be unknown. Unknown travelers are shot on sight,” says Isabel Fall. “The fact that Isabel Fall was an unknown led to her death.”

Isabel Fall isn’t dead. There is a person who wrote under that name alive on the planet right now, someone who published a critically acclaimed, award-nominated short story. If she wanted to publish again, she surely could.

Isabel Fall is a ghost nonetheless.

In January 2020, not long after her short story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” was published in the online science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, Fall asked her editor to take the story down, and then checked into a psychiatric ward for thoughts of self-harm and suicide.

The story — and especially its title, which co-opts a transphobic meme — had provoked days of contentious debate online within the science fiction community, the trans community, and the community of people who worry that cancel culture has run amok. Because there was little biographical information available about its author, the debate hinged on one question: Who was Isabel Fall? And that question ate her alive. When she emerged from the hospital a few weeks later, the world had moved on, but she was still scarred by what had happened. She decided on something drastic: She would no longer be Isabel Fall.

As a trans woman early in transition, Fall had the option of retreating to the relative safety of her legal, masculine identity. That’s what she did, staying out of the limelight and growing ever more frustrated by what had happened to her. She bristles when I ask her in an email if she’s stopped transitioning, but it’s the only phrase I can think of to describe how the situation appears.

Isabel Fall was on a path to becoming herself, and then she wasn’t — and all because she published a short story. And then her life fell apart.

In the 18 months since, what happened to her has become a case study for various people who want to talk about the Way We Live Today. It has been held up as an example of progressives eating their own, of the dangers of online anonymity, of the need for sensitivity readers or content warnings. But what this story really symbolizes is the fact that as we’ve grown more adept at using the internet, we’ve also grown more adept at destroying people’s lives, but from a distance, in an abstracted way.

Sometimes, the path to your personal hell is paved with other people’s best intentions.

---

Like most internet outrage cycles, the fracas over “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” was enormous news within the bubble of people who cared about it and made barely a blip outside of that bubble. The full tale is amorphous and weird, and recounting its ins and outs is nearly impossible to do here. Just trying to explain the motivations of all involved is a task in and of itself, and at any rate, that story has been told many times, quoting others extensively. Fall has never spoken publicly about the situation until now.

Clarkesworld published Fall’s story on January 1, 2020. For a while, people seemed to like it.

“I was in awe of it on a sentence level. I thought it was beautiful and devastating and incredibly subversive and surprising. It did all this work in a very short amount of space, which I found completely breathtaking. It had been a long time since I had read a short story that I had enjoyed and that also had rewired my brain a little bit,” said author Carmen Maria Machado, who read the story before controversy had broken out.

In the first 10 days after “Attack Helicopter” was published, what muted criticism existed was largely confined to the story’s comments section on Clarkesworld. The tweets that still exist from that period were largely positive responses to the story, often from trans people.

But first in Clarkesworld’s comments and then on Twitter, the combination of the story’s title and the relative lack of information about Fall began to fuel a growing paranoia around the story and its author. The presence of trolls who seemed to take the story’s title at face value only added to that paranoia. And when read through the lens of “Isabel Fall is trolling everybody,” “Attack Helicopter” started to seem menacing to plenty of readers.

“Attack Helicopter” was a slippery, knotty piece of fiction that captured a particular trans feminine uncertainty better than almost anything I have ever read. Set in a nightmarish future in which the US military has co-opted gender to the degree that it turns recruits into literal weapons, it told the story of Barb, a pilot whose gender is “helicopter.” Together with Axis — Barb’s gunner, who was also assigned helicopter — Barb carried out various missions against assorted opposition forces who live within what is at present the United States.

Then, because its title was also a transphobic meme and because “Isabel Fall” had absolutely no online presence beyond the Clarkesworld story, many people began to worry that Fall was somehow a front for right-wing, anti-trans reactionaries. They expressed those fears in the comments of the story, in various science fiction discussion groups, and all over Twitter. Fans of the story pushed back, saying it was a bold and striking piece of writing from an exciting new voice. While the debate was initially among trans people for the most part, it eventually spilled over to cis sci-fi fans who boosted the concerns of trans people who were worried about the story.

Neil Clarke, Clarkesworld’s editor, pulled the story on Fall’s behalf on January 15, replacing it with an editorial note that read, in part, “The recent barrage of attacks on Isabel have taken a toll and I ask that even if you disagree with the decision, that you respect it. This is not censorship. She needed this to be done for her own personal safety and health.”

Fall, reeling, checked into the hospital. She has since retitled her story “Helicopter Story,” and under that title, it was nominated for a 2021 Hugo Award, one of the most prestigious honors in science fiction.

“How do I feel about the nomination? I don’t know,” Fall says by email. “It’s a nice validation to know that some people liked the story enough to nominate it. But it’s also dreadful to know that this will just mean reopening the conversation, which will lead to a lot of people being hurt.”

I started emailing with Fall in February, just over a year after “Attack Helicopter” blew up. I had been working on a completely different piece about the short story and wanted to invite her to share her version of events, which thus far have been defined by voices that are not her own. Clarke put me in touch with Fall, and she agreed to speak with me on the condition that we only correspond over email. I am the first journalist she has talked to about what happened. I do not know her legal identity, but I have confirmed that she is the person who wrote “Attack Helicopter” from looking at earlier drafts of the story that Fall shared with me.

When Fall published “Attack Helicopter,” she was not yet ready to be publicly out as a trans woman, but hoped that writing it for a niche publication in a community that is frequently friendly to queer writers would be a good way to get her feet wet.

She had at least some reason to expect that the complete vacuum of personal information about her — the short author bio attached to the story said only that she was born in 1988 — wouldn’t be questioned. Trans spaces, both online and in real life, have a long history of allowing an anonymity that paradoxically hides within one’s true identity.

If you want to attend a support group meeting and say your name is Isabel and you use she/her pronouns, you will be treated as such, no matter how you look or what name is on your driver’s license. Gatekeeping in a trans space usually involves loosely enforced rules that focus on giving those who exist within them a safe place to explore their identity. Those rules almost never attempt to determine that someone is “trans enough.”

But anonymity isn’t always welcome on the internet, where an anonymous identity can be weaponized for the worst. That gap — between the good-faith anonymity assumed in trans spaces and the bad-faith anonymity increasingly assumed online — was the one Fall wandered into.

---

“I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” is a “copypasta” (a snippet of text that is copied and pasted across the internet, sometimes with alterations, sometimes word-for-word) that dates to 2014. It most likely originated on the forums for the game Team Fortress 2 before making its way to Reddit and 4chan, where it became a meme used to mock and demean trans people who spoke earnestly about their experiences and identities. The meme is transphobic on its face, because it suggests that one’s gender can be decided on a whim.

Fall’s story tries to take the meme seriously. What would it be like if your gender was actually “helicopter”?

As a story, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” explores three separate but interconnected ideas: gender as an innate part of the self, gender as a performance for society, and gender as a (literal) weapon of the state. The story’s complicated exploration of gender identity doesn’t work for everyone, but it hits others with almost laser-targeted precision.

At its core, “Attack Helicopter” is about the intersection of gender and American hegemony. On that level, it has plenty to say even to cisgender people. After all, if all gender is on some level a performance (and it is), then it can be co-opted and perverted by the state. But if it’s also innate on some level (and it is), then we are powerless against whatever it is that enough people decide gender performance should look like. We are constantly trapped by gender, even when we know we are trapped by it. You can’t truly escape something so all-pervasive; you can only negotiate your own terms with it, and everybody’s terms are different.

The conversation around gender “is dominated by those who can tolerate and thrive in it. It is conducted by the voices of those who are able to survive speech and its consequences,” Fall says. “But it is a conversation that is, by necessity, reductive. We need teams and groups and identities, not just to belong to, but as mental objects to manipulate and wield. If we tried to hold 10 million unique experiences of gender in our mind they would sift through our fingers and roll away.”

Such a conversation around gender is not particularly conducive to those who are figuring out their gender in public, as all trans people must do eventually. It’s especially not conducive to artists who are exploring their gender in their art, under even greater degrees of public scrutiny. Which is to say: That conversation is not conducive to people like Fall.

“We make boxes that seem to enclose a satisfying number of human experiences, and then we put labels on those and argue about them instead,” she says. “The boxes change over time, according to a process which is governed by, as far as I can tell, cycles of human suffering: We realize that forcing people into the last set of boxes was painful and wrong, we wring our hands, we fold up some new boxes and assure ourselves that this time we got it right, or at least right enough for now. Because we need the boxes to argue over. I do not want to be in a box. I want to sift through your fingers, to vanish, to be unseen.”

The question many people asked when “Attack Helicopter” was published was: What were Fall’s intentions in borrowing a transphobic meme for her title?

When I came out in 2018, the “attack helicopter” meme had already mostly been ironically reclaimed by trans people, who had undercut its sting by, in essence, shouting, “Get better material!” at transphobes. (To wit.)

Fall was channeling that ironic reclamation, but readers were quick to jump to their own conclusions. Many only read as far as the title before assuming Fall was either transphobic herself or a trans person intentionally using the meme to make a point.

All they had to go on was one biographical detail: “Isabel Fall was born in 1988.” There was no Isabel Fall Twitter profile. She had never published fiction before. She was a blank space, upon which anyone could project their worst fears or biggest hopes.

“When the story was first published, we knew nothing about Isabel Fall’s identity, and there was a smattering of strange behavior around the comments and who was linking to it that led people to suspect right-wing trolls were involved in this,” says science fiction author Neon Yang. They were publicly critical of the story on Twitter. “In hindsight, they were probably just drawn by the provocative title and possibly did not even read the story. And yes, it seems like an overreaction on the part of the trans people who responded this way, but being trans in this world is having to constantly justify your right to existence at all, and when you’re forced to be on the defensive all the time, everything starts to look like an attack.”

But a lot of trans women adopt an online pseudonym before coming out publicly, including me. To come out as a trans woman in a transphobic patriarchal society that views our existence as a curiosity at best is rarely something done all at once. It requires baby steps, like becoming used to a new name that starts to feel like home.

Absent any context, “This writer is a secret troll” seems like a huge, unjustified leap to make. Within the science fiction community specifically, it’s still a huge leap, but not necessarily an unjustified one. In recent years, a neoreactionary movement known as the “Sad Puppies” has advocated for politically and artistically conservative science fiction and gamed the Hugo Award nominations, drawing ire from genre writers old and new. The Sad Puppies’ position is, more or less, that great sci-fi is traditional, usually focused on straight white guys in militaristic settings, with straightforward prose. It’s a pushback against the diversification of science fiction and fantasy writing, and though the Puppies’ influence has waned, the lasting effects of their efforts have only stirred up fear and uncertainty within the community. Thus, paranoia was the prevailing mood under which many first read “Attack Helicopter.”

A few people insisted to me that the controversy began with honest but negative readings of the story by people who felt Fall had missed the mark, before mutating into something worse. One unstated assumption made here is that only trans people should write about trans experiences, and therefore, Fall should have identified herself as a trans woman directly in the bio attached to the story. This notion is admirable on the surface but fails to account for the many ways in which trans artists explore and experience their gender in what they create. Sometimes you can only figure out you’re trans by writing about being trans.

“[In criticism], you can say, ‘This struck me as somewhat clumsy and born from inexperience.’ That’s a fair thing to say about art,” says Gretchen Felker-Martin, an author and critic who says she loved “Attack Helicopter.” “What isn’t fair to say is, ‘The person who wrote this is definitely straight, and they’ve never met a trans person.’ There’s some room for error there, when it comes to whether the person whose work you’re critiquing is some sort of famous cultural icon or something. But Isabel was not that. She’s a woman writing under a pseudonym.”

Fall remembers the sequence of events differently, and so far as I have been able to figure out, her sequence of events is the correct one: Suspicion of her motives in writing “Attack Helicopter” spurred an almost immediate attempt to figure out her real identity, which fueled suspicion that she was trying to hide something. She was accused of being an alt-right troll or a Nazi. Only when things had gone too far did the good-faith criticism start to roll in. Fall says she found some of that criticism useful, particularly with regard to the story’s treatment of Barb’s race. (Barb is Korean.) But in her telling, the good-faith criticism came after the attempts to prove she was a bad actor. By then, the damage was done.

“Framing matters. After the frame around the story was in place, it could not be shaken, and everything that happened afterwards was influenced by it,” Fall says. “I have also heard people say, ‘We deserve to know if Isabel Fall is someone with a history of writing things that divide queer communities.’ Is it now a crime to divide a queer community? Why shouldn’t queer people be divided on one issue or another?”

The mess very quickly turned nasty and personal, and it was happening where Fall could see all of it.

“I sought out and read everything written about the story. I couldn’t stop,” Fall says. “It was like that old nightmare-fantasy. What if someone gave you a ledger of everything anyone’s ever said about you, anywhere? Who wouldn’t read it? I would read it; I would go straight to the worst things.”

One criticism above all got to her: that Fall must be a cis man, because no woman would ever write in the way she did. And because this criticism was so often leveled by cis women, Fall felt her gender dysphoria (the gap between her gender and her gender assigned at birth) increasing. In Fall’s story, Barb and Axis destroy the lives of people they cannot even see. Now, in a bitterly ironic twist, the same was happening to her.

“In this story I think that the helicopter is a closet. ... Where do you feel dysphoria the hardest? In the closet. Or so I have to hope; I have not been anywhere outside it, except for [in publishing ‘Attack Helicopter’], which convinced me it was safer inside,” Fall says. “Most of all, I wanted people to say, ‘This story was written by a woman who understands being a woman.’ I obviously failed horribly.”

That was when she asked Clarke to take down the story. That was when she checked herself into a psych ward, so she wouldn’t kill herself in the midst of her dysphoric spiral.

“It ended the way it did because I thought I would die,” she says.

---

Twitter is really good at making otherwise unimportant things seem like important news.

It’s incredibly hard to imagine “Attack Helicopter” receiving the degree of blowback it did in a world where Twitter didn’t exist. There were discussions of the story on forums and in comment threads all over the internet, but it is the nature of Twitter that all but ensured this particular argument would rage out of control. Isabel Fall’s story has been held up as an example of “cancel culture run amok,” but like almost all examples of cancel culture run amok, it’s mostly an example of Twitter run amok.

“It’s very easy to do a paranoid reading on Twitter,” says Lee Mandelo, a PhD candidate at the University of Kentucky and an author and critic who writes for Tor.com. They were among the earliest advocates of “Attack Helicopter,” and they wrote a lengthy Twitter thread (collected as a blog post here) about paranoid versus reparative readings of art, in response to Clarkesworld pulling the story.

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader.

This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings.

“[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

Kat Lo, a researcher whose work tracks how information and misinformation spread across social networks, explained to me that Twitter itself is as big a part of Isabel Fall’s story as a faceless mob of the site’s users. The sheer assault of information on Twitter makes it difficult to parse, and unlike other social networks, it doesn’t really have elements that preserve any semblance of context (whereas an individual subreddit is built around a particular subject, and a Facebook feed or group is limited to posts by one’s friends or organized around one topic, at least in theory). Twitter ends up organized around what Lo calls “influencer hubs.”

For instance, if you’re a science fiction fan, you might follow a big-name author or critic in the field, and since they’re likely a bigger expert on the topic than you are, you’ll probably regard them as such. But Twitter is a platform that rewards divisive opinions, which are more likely to drive engagement (hearts, retweets, and the like). So, many influencers with the biggest reach on Twitter are also people whose core identity is expressing divisive opinions.

Where this becomes an issue is when influencers from different worlds start to cross-pollinate, which is precisely what happened with “Attack Helicopter.” Though much of the early discussion of the story was among trans sci-fi fans, and though much of that discussion was pretty evenly split between paranoid and reparative readings, the takes that were amplified by bigger and bigger names in the sci-fi world were almost always the paranoid ones, because those were the most divisive and most clickable. And the people elevating those paranoid takes were almost all cis.

“Attack Helicopter” ended up stuck in a feedback loop, as cis people circulated takes skewed toward bad-faith readings of Fall’s story, in the name of supporting trans people. “Attack Helicopter” went from a story that people were debating, to a story that was perceived as one trans people had a few qualms with, to one that was perceived as actively harming trans people, almost entirely because of how Twitter functions.

Once a Twitter conversation takes off like this, it becomes very difficult to stop, which leads to stranger and stranger levels of binary thinking and gatekeeping. I found two tweets posted within hours of each other where one insisted Fall must be a cis man and the other insisted she must be a cis woman. Both were sure she was mocking trans people.

Once a Twitter controversy has reached that critical mass is usually when you might start reading about it in the media.

“What’s on Twitter extends far beyond Twitter, because people make Twitter relevant to the rest of the world. So in a sense, they’re reproducing the chaos and social structures of Twitter, by bringing them into the rest of the world,” Lo says. “It ends up having outsize influence, because the people who are on Twitter perceive Twitter as being bigger and more representative [of the world] than it really is.”

---

By the time it was pulled, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” had been read by tens of thousands of people, according to Clarke, though its ultimate audience is impossible to total because archived versions of the story and pirated PDFs reached countless others. (Fall also issued a limited-edition ebook of the story under the title “Helicopter Story” last fall, to qualify for an award — not the Hugo. The ebook was not nominated.)

In the two weeks that the story was online, discussion around it attracted interest, and the story amassed a wide number of fans beyond the normal sphere of science fiction short-story aficionados. Many people who read it did so because it was controversial, but it only became controversial because it was so widely read.

Even more people came to know “Attack Helicopter” as an exemplar of the left eating its own. Most of the people I talked to for this story, regardless of whether they initially criticized or praised “Attack Helicopter,” cited articles by established pundits, including one in the Atlantic, as supercharging the discussion. Those articles launched the discourse beyond the twin niches of online trans communities and online SFF communities and sent it swirling out into the larger internet of people vaguely interested in free speech absolutism. With every new article, a new audience of people outside of the science fiction community learned about Isabel Fall, and a new wave of anger fell on everybody involved, regardless of their position, including Fall.

“There were several reporters that reached out to me right after the story came down. I remember having a conversation with one of them and saying, ‘Is [writing about] this really what you want to do? I’m not going to participate. I think that this is just going to make it worse,’” Clarke says. “And they ran with it. It brought in the whole cancel culture thing. Isabel needed that story down for her, not for them, and not for anybody else. But for her. And that’s why it came down. I tried to make that clear [in the editor’s note on the story’s removal]. But people still wanted that cancel narrative.”

“Attack Helicopter” was nominated for a Hugo Award (a prize for science fiction and fantasy works that is voted on by SFF fans) in April, under the title “Helicopter Story.” The nomination prompted a new round of criticism, this time mostly centered on Clarke and how he didn’t do enough to preemptively shield Fall before the story was published. Clarke says he’s happy to take the responsibility, but both he and Fall insist he did everything right. Clarkesworld hired a sensitivity reader. The story spent far longer in the editing process than most other stories published in the magazine. And so on.

What happened in the wake of “Attack Helicopter” being pulled is that Isabel Fall stopped being someone who acts and became someone who is acted upon. The prevailing narratives about the story erased her agency almost entirely. Fall wanted the story to be titled “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” and when she eventually retitled it “Helicopter Story” as a vague gesture of goodwill, many people assumed she had been pressured into doing so. Fall wanted the story taken off the internet, and when it was, many assumed she had been “canceled.” Both narratives framed Fall as an unwitting puppet of forces beyond her control.

So what does Isabel Fall think? She takes great issue with the way cancel culture has been positioned within the larger culture, while also allowing that certain elements of what happened to her seem to fit within that framework.

“The powerful want to say that we are entering a dangerous new era where ‘people disliking things en masse’ has coalesced into some kind of crowdsourced [weapon], firing on arbitrary targets from orbit and vaporizing their reputations,” she wrote to me in an email. “The use of mass social sanction gives the less powerful a weapon against the more powerful, so long as they can mobilize loudly and persistently. _This is not new. _Shame and laughter are vital tools for freedom.”

She cautions, however, that “like all weapons, it will do the most damage when aimed at the least defended, the isolated, those with no one to stand up for them, publicly or privately. And we must be careful with the temptation to use it inside our own houses to destroy shapes we think are intruders.”

If anybody canceled Isabel Fall, it was Isabel Fall. She remains the subject of her own sentences.

“The story was withdrawn to avoid my death,” she says. “It was not withdrawn as a concession that it was transphobic or secretly fascist or too problematic for publication. When people approve of its withdrawal they are approving, even if unwittingly, of the use of gender dysphoria to silence writers.”

---

If Twitter makes it very easy for unimportant things to seem like important news, it also creates an environment where one of our deepest, most human impulses becomes almost calcified. When we hurt someone, we want, so badly, for everyone to see our good intentions and not our actions. It’s a natural human impulse. I do it. You do it. Everybody involved in this story did it, too, including Isabel Fall.

But the structure of Twitter and the way it rewards a constant escalation of emotion makes it exceedingly difficult to just back down, to say, “I thought I was doing the right thing, but I hurt somebody very badly in the process.”

Many of those who criticized “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” on the grounds that it was harmful operated with the absolute best of intentions. I have talked to many of them at great length. I believe them when they say that they earnestly thought the story was a false front for bad actors, because being trans on the internet turns your alarm sensors all the way up. (It’s not like the internet isn’t teeming with awful people hiding in plain sight. Why give anyone the benefit of the doubt?)

I believe the story’s detractors were hurt by the title or some of the content or the very idea of the story. I believe they truly feel that trans stories should only be written by trans people and that Fall should have had to out herself before publishing. I believe they believe — still — that they did the right thing.

They still destroyed a woman’s life.

After she checked out of the hospital, Isabel Fall ceased to be Isabel Fall. “I had a few other stories in the works on similar themes, and I withdrew them; that is the most concrete thing I can say that I stopped doing,” Fall says. “More abstractly, more emotionally, I have stopped trying to believe I am a woman or to work towards womanness. If other people want to put markings on my gender-sphere and decide what I am, fine, let them. It’s not worth fighting.”

Isabel Fall was on a path to living as an out trans woman with a career writing science fiction, and now, she says, there will be no more Isabel Fall stories. She is done writing under that name, and she now considers “Isabel Fall” an impossible goal to achieve, a person she will never be.

“I don’t know what I meant to do as Isabel,” she says. “I know [that publishing “Attack Helicopter”] was an important test for myself, sort of a peer review of my own womannness. I think I tried to open a door and it was closed from the other side because I did not look the right shape to pass through it.”

Trans people — trans women, especially — can find their first few steps as themselves in public particularly stressful. That stress is why it’s so often important for us to have safe ways to explore who we are, under whatever veil of anonymity we can concoct for ourselves. When we’re behind that veil, we can divorce ourselves from the identities we were assigned at birth, at least a little bit. To have that veil punctured is a great violence, and Isabel Fall had her veil punctured.

Every day, the person who might have been Isabel Fall sees friends who tore down her story and speculated on her true motivations and identity go on with their lives. They are not stuck in the events of January 2020, like she is. These friends don’t know who she is. Probably. She doesn’t know how to talk to them about it, and to confront anyone about their role in the chaos would require outing herself. She says only one person has reached out to apologize, via Clarke.

“It ends up with groups of people I thought of as friends all assuring each other they did nothing wrong ... and I do not even know if they know it was me,” Fall says. “Or they make vague statements about how they are thinking of everyone harmed by the mess around the story, including the author, as if that mess were an inevitable result of publishing a flawed and problematic story: as if the solution was simply to employ even more_ _sensitivity readers, sensitivity readers who agreed with them and could change the story into something they wanted to read.”

---

So what’s the worst that might have happened if, somehow, the “Attack Helicopter” detractors were right and the story was a secret reactionary text?

As far as I can tell, the worst that would have happened is that another piece of transphobic literature would have existed. To be clear, transphobic literature is worth protesting. I would rather have less of it. But there’s a large gap between speaking out against a work of art you find objectionable and trying desperately to sniff out an author’s true identity, with ever more horrific accusations.

It is easy for me to say this with hindsight, of course. I know Isabel Fall just wanted to write a good story. I’ve seen earlier drafts of that story. I know how hard she worked to make it exactly what she wanted it to be. I suppose that simply by talking with Fall as much as I have, I have subtly put myself on “her side.” Maybe you shouldn’t trust my good intentions either.

But in any internet maelstrom that gets held up as a microcosm of the Way We Live Today, one simple factor often gets washed away: These things happened to someone. And the asymmetrical nature of the harm done to that person is hard to grasp until you’ve been that person. A single critical tweet about the matter was not experienced by Isabel Fall as just one tweet. She experienced it as part of a tsunami that nearly took her life. And that tsunami might have been abated if people had simply asked themselves, “What’s the worst that could happen if I’m right? And what’s the worst that could happen if I’m wrong?”

Everybody I talked to in the course of reporting this story said some variation on “I hope Isabel is okay.” And she is. Sort of. In the months I’ve spent emailing Isabel Fall, she’s revealed herself to be witty and thoughtful and sardonic and wounded and angry and maybe a little paranoid. But who wouldn’t be all of those things? Yet I’m emailing with a ghost who exists only in this one email chain. The person who might have been Isabel has given up on actually building a life and career as Isabel Fall. And that is a kind of death.

“Isabel was somebody I often wanted to be, but not someone I succeeded at being,” she says. “I think the reaction to the story proves that I can’t be her, or shouldn’t be her, or at least won’t ever be her. Everyone knew I was a fraud, right away.”

[Emily VanDerWerff](https://twitter.com/emilyvdw)_ is Vox’s critic at large. Read other essays by the author [here](https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/3/18647615/coming-out-transgender-handmaids-tale-emily-todd-vanderwerff) and [here](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2020/2/12/21075683/trans-coming-out-cost-of-womanhood-pink-tax)._

More from The Gatekeepers Issue

Adam Hayes for Vox

---

Support our work

Culture reflects society. At Vox, we aim to explain what entertainment says about people, and how it can help us understand different perspectives. Financial contributions from our readers help us continue to offer this work for free. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today from as little as $3.

-"A sci-fi writer got meta about gender. The internet responded by ruining her life."

[extratone]

[extratone]

"Twitter appears to no longer allow ‘hashtag movements’ for verification"

*By BY LIAM O'DELL July 12, 2021

Leave a Comment on Twitter appears to no longer allow ‘hashtag movements’ for verification*** 'Jul 12, 2021 at 12:00'

---

It looks like Twitter has just made it even harder for activists to be verified on the platform. My #VerifyDisabledTwitter campaign has already highlighted the significant number of disabled campaigners who are yet to receive the coveted blue tick (100+), with people now receiving emails with further details about their rejection – namely that the evidence provided by the individual doesn’t meet Twitter’s notability criteria. Now, however, the criteria may have changed.

Under Twitter’s current verification policy, “activists, organisers and other influential individuals” require both on-platform and off-platform notability to be verified. In terms of the latter, they need something like a Google Trends profile, a stable Wikipedia article or appearances in news outlets. As for the former, it’s either that they’re in the top 0.05% of active accounts in a specific geographic region – either as it is or in terms of mentions/internal signals – or they’ve established and are credited for “a hashtag movement that is capturing a large volume of conversation within a given community”.

You would only need to meet one of the three criteria under the ‘on-platform activity’ column, and yet, it seems that for those choosing to verify themselves under the activist category, the option to enter a “hashtag movement” is no longer available.

Instead, I’ve heard and seen from three separate sources that the response is simply: “You aren’t eligible for verification in this category. You have not met the minimum follower or mention threshold for your region that is required to be verified as an activist or influential individual.” Despite it still being listed under their official verification policy, it looks like the ‘hashtag movement’ way in has been shut off to everyone.

With marginalised accounts receiving small follower counts – one simple reason being that they’re marginalised voices – this heavy focus on the number of followers shuts out so many activists. It fails to recognise a basic principle which underpins social media campaigning on platforms such as Twitter when it comes to underrepresented individuals.

And to be clear, I also have my criticisms around the reductionist idea of a ‘hashtag movement’ too, given it doesn’t acknowledge the nuance of activism. It’s good this criteria could possibly have been removed by Twitter, but the remaining two options are useless. Even with a small number of followers, disabled activists are notable within the community, and they’re making an impact.

The solution to this is simple, and one I’ve mentioned before: Twitter needs to amend the policy so that on-platform notability isn’t the deciding factor in a verification decision. Impact – and therefore, notability – can happen in the media and other areas away from Twitter. Another idea, similar to verifying individuals associated with notable businesses, is to verify those with strong links to disability charities and initiatives. These organisations consider the individual to be influential when it comes to outreach work, so why not consider this evidence of a campaigner’s notability?

In addition to the 100+ disabled individuals and organisations who have had their applications rejected, the fact that Twitter’s form for activists is now solely dependent on follower count, despite the official policy stating otherwise, is further proof that the system is failing activists – specifically disabled campaigners.

This has to change. Now.

-"Twitter appears to no longer allow ‘hashtag movements’ for verification"

[extratone]

and my haters can quote me on that (@lyta_gold):

i think my general advice for posting would be to ask yourself: "am i making bold claims in support of a narrative that i THINK might be true or do i have any actual, reliable evidence here"

the evil mr. arc 🎩✨ (@candy_chateau):

Social media was made for making the dumbest posts humanly possible, and fleets let me put godawful Yoda stickers and giant red text over a picture of a corndog

[extratone]

"Why Twitter's fleets flopped"

By Casey Newton ''

---

Fleets (Twitter)

In November, after testing the feature in foreign markets for eight months, Twitter announced that Fleets — its version of the ephemeral stories that have colonized so many social apps since debuting in Snapchat — would become available worldwide. At the time, I was enthusiastic about the move:

Twitter enters the ephemeral posting game with some real advantages on its side. One, the format is familiar — if you’ve posted an Instagram story, you already know how to post a fleet. Two, the real-time nature of Twitter lends itself to documenting photos and videos in the moment — something fleets excel at. (Twitter never really cracked photo or video sharing; I suspect fleets will help it make inroads there.)

And three, tweets have always been best thought of as a mostly ephemeral format anyway. The old joke about Twitter is that it was where you would go to discuss what you had for breakfast. Now fleets are here, and there’s never been a better place to post your bowl of Cheerios.

As it turns out, though, I got most of this wrong. Less than a year after launch, Twitter said today that it would get rid of fleets on August 3. “We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter,” product manager Ilya Brown wrote in a blog post. “But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped.”

So why didn’t it work? Two things I mentioned in my first column on the subject did create hurdles for Twitter: fleets arrived late to an already crowded market, and they didn’t evolve fast enough to keep pace with creative tools on Instagram, TikTok, and other apps. (The generic, bolted-on visual appearance probably didn’t help either.)

But the real issue, I think, is in a point I listed as a strength in the excerpt above: tweets have always been best thought of as a mostly ephemeral format anyway. I believe that this, more than anything else, explains fleets’ demise.

Twitter originated not as a crowdsourced global news network but as a place to share status updates via text messages. They were modeled on the “away messages” that elder millennials once posted on AOL Instant Messenger before stepping away from their desks, updated for a world that had embraced mobile phones (but not yet invented smartphone apps.) Tweets, like away messages before them, were always meant to capture passing thoughts.

Fast forward to today, and Twitter now embraces a much wider variety of uses. Plenty of people write long-form essays over dozens of threaded posts, and people can “pin” a tweet to to highlight something that deserves a more prominent, permanent place in their profile.

But on a daily basis, Twitter is primarily a repository for the passing thought: an interesting link, a savage dunk, an awful pun or a dad joke. It is the promotional app of choice for anyone about to do something right now: go live on Twitch, start a Space, host a Zoom webinar.

Very few of these posts have any value beyond the first 24 hours in which they are tweeted. Only rarely on Twitter do you encounter a post older than a day; the vast majority of tweets are never seen again.

And so when fleets appeared at the top of the timeline last year, it’s understandable that the user base had no idea what to make of them. They were already using Twitter to post ephemeral thoughts, and those thoughts are called tweets. Fleets fell into a kind of uncanny valley of product development: they fulfilled a role too similar to tweets to serve a real need. Anything a person might have fleeted, they simply tweeted instead.

(It’s notable that the other big product Twitter launched in the past year, the live audio feature called Spaces, seems to be growing much more quickly: it’s different from tweets in an obvious way, but complements the core product such that it feels at home within the Twitter app.)

Ultimately, it speaks well of Twitter’s product organization that the company shut down fleets as quickly as it did. The company says it will bring some aspects of the product into tweets, including its camera, text formatting tools, and GIF stickers. The goal is still to get more people posting on Twitter — an act that still too often feels like screaming into a void, particularly for people who have just joined the service. “We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter,” Brown said.

To me, one solution is obvious: given that tweets are ephemeral by nature for most users anyway, build that into the product. Tweets can still be permanent by default. But let users set their tweets to delete automatically after a day, a month, or a year. You don’t have to be a high-profile user to have seen the various ways in which people’s old tweets are used against them. Many have had their livelihoods derailed.

And yes, some of that accountability has been necessary and good. But I’d humbly suggest that most of us are better off living in a world where our every passing thought is not committed to a permanent, searchable global archive. Anyone who feels differently is on some level arguing for the construction of a panopticon, and I say the hell with that.

Ultimately, fleets were a worthwhile experiment in exploring what temporary posts could mean for Twitter. The lesson from the user base is that they view many, and perhaps most, of their posts as ephemeral already. If Twitter wants us to post more often, it should consider leaning into that.

---

The Ratio

Today in news that could affect public perception of the big tech companies.

⬆️ Trending up: TikTok now has more than 3 billion installs worldwide — the first non-Facebook app to do so. People love this app. And so does Facebook’s antitrust defense team! (SensorTower)

⬆️ Trending up: Facebook said it would pay out $1 billion to creators between now and the end of 2022. I’m extremely curious to learn more details here. (Taylor Lorenz / New York Times)

⬆️ Trending up: WhatsApp is testing multi-device support. Useful! (Richard Lawler / The Verge)

🔃 Trending sideways: A number of Twitch streamers are promoting gambling websites on their streams in ways that may violate US laws, experts say. A review “found that 64 of the top 1,000 most-trafficked Twitch streamers have streamed crypto slots or advertised sponsorship deals from crypto gambling websites.” (Cecilia D’Anastasio / Wired)

---

Governing

⭐ Facebook called for FTC chair Lina Khan to recuse herself from the government’s ongoing antitrust case due to her past writings critical of the company. However unlikely the move is to succeed, lawyers say the filing could improve Facebook’s odds if it has to appeal a decision. Here’s Brent Kendall at the Wall Street Journal:

“For the entirety of her professional career, Chair Khan has consistently and very publicly concluded that Facebook is guilty of violating the antitrust laws,” the company said Wednesday in a formal recusal petition filed with the FTC.

“When a new commissioner has already drawn factual and legal conclusions and deemed the target a lawbreaker, due process requires that individual to recuse herself,” Facebook said in the petition.

Hackers affiliated with the Russian government targeted European government officials with LinkedIn messages containing malicious links “designed to exploit unknown vulnerabilities in Windows and iOS,” according to a new report from Google. Finally, a good excuse not to check your LinkedIn messages. (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / Vice)

Republican members of Congress are calling for an investigation of whether Amazon “unfairly used its influence” in seeking a now-scrapped $10 billion Pentagon contract. Kind of weird to suggest that Amazon had much clout during the Trump years, no? (Kenneth P. Vogel and Kate Conger / New York Times)

Twitter saw a marked increase in the number of government takedown requests targeted at journalists in the first half of 2021, according to its new transparency report. “India topped the list for information requests by governments in the second half of 2020, overtaking the United States for the first time.” (Sheila Dang and Elizabeth Culliford / Reuters)

About 1 in 5 adults in the United Kingdom has deleted the NHS’ COVID-19 exposure notification app, likely to avoid pressure to self-isolate. “More than a third of people aged between 18 and 34 years in the UK have deleted the app already, with about a third of those who do still have it expressing an intention to delete it in six days’ time.” (Kevin Rawlinson / Guardian)

Amid growing antitrust pressure, rival Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba are considering opening up their services to one another. “Initial steps from Alibaba could include introducing Tencent’s WeChat Pay to Alibaba’s e-commerce marketplaces, Taobao and Tmall, some of the people said.” (Jing Yang and Keith Zhai / Wall Street Journal)

A profile of the Cyberspace Administration of China, a formerly obscure agency that has taken the lead in challenging the country’s tech giants over their data handling. “With the U.S. lobbying other nations to prevent China from obtaining technology like advanced computer chips and Xi undertaking a national project to develop them, stringent data security controls risk further disrupting supply chains, balkanizing financial markets and forcing countries to pick sides.” (Jamie Tarabay and Coco Liu / Bloomberg)

---

Industry

⭐ Facebook reorganized CrowdTangle under its integrity team, and sidelined its founder, after executives grew unhappy with the way journalists used it to showcase the prevalence of conservative outrage-bait on the platform. I wrote about how Kevin Roose’s use of the platform was driving executives crazy last year. A disturbing report from Roose at the New York Times:

“One of the main reasons that I left Facebook is that the most senior leadership in the company does not want to invest in understanding the impact of its core products,” Mr. Boland said, in his first interview since departing. “And it doesn’t want to make the data available for others to do the hard work and hold them accountable.”

Mr. Boland, who oversaw CrowdTangle as well as other Facebook transparency efforts, said the tool fell out of favor with influential Facebook executives around the time of last year’s presidential election, when journalists and researchers used it to show that pro-Trump commentators were spreading misinformation and hyperpartisan commentary with stunning success.

Facebook is giving up on typing with your brain as an augmented reality interface. The technology isn’t advancing quickly enough. (Adi Robertson / The Verge)

Amazon acquired a dozen Facebook employees working on wireless internet as part of a push into satellite internet services. Can’t remember the last time a tech giant sold a group of employees this way. (Sarah Krouse and Sylvia Varnham O'Regan / The Information)

Facebook Group administrator can now designate some members as “experts” who have special knowledge about the groups’s subject matter. They’ll get badges that show up on group posts, comments, and in Q&A. (Dave Gershgorn / The Verge)

Clubhouse launched a way for users to message each other inside the app called Backchannel. “The functionality is designed to help moderators chat among themselves during an active room; let people connect after an event; and broadly, foster text conversations that otherwise would have to take place in a separate app.” (Ashley Carman / The Verge)

Apple’s introduction of App Tracking Transparency has begun to hurt advertisers on Facebook, industry experts say. “People are giving apps permission to track their behavior just 25% of the time, Branch found, severing a data pipeline that has powered the targeted advertising industry for years.” (Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg)

Twitter will now let you change settings on who can reply after you post a tweet. Helpful for random citizens who suddenly find themselves the site’s main character of the day. (Jay Peters / The Verge)

---

Those good tweets

we're removing Fleets on August 3, working on some new stuff we're sorry or you're welcome

we need a slur for toddlers

this is probably an internet transgression of some sort but i'm a FB group for naughty cats called "this cat is INNOCENT of all charges" and someone just posted what may be the funniest cat pic i've ever seen

this guy on tiktok rated emergency alarm sounds from different countries and there's no reason it should be this funny 💀

---

Talk to me

Send me tips, comments, questions, and your final fleets: casey@platformer.news.

-"Why Twitter's fleets flopped"

[extratone]

"The Inner Ring of The Internet "

By ** ''

---

Photo by Kevin Erdvig, treatment by Nathan Baschez

Hi, Nathan here! It’s been too long, I know!! I’ve got a big piece on product wedges coming out next week, but today I am so excited to share with you this special guest post from one of my favorite writers on the internet: Ali Montag.

I love Ali’s writing because it focuses me on the things that actually matter. It takes me to a calm, centered place, where I can see my goals with new clarity. Upon first read, this post may seem more like writing advice than business strategy, but upon closer inspection you will see this lesson is critical for anyone building anything.

You’re gonna love this one.

—Nathan

---

On Wednesday nights in Austin, I meet with a group of friends in a nearby backyard. We’re a bit of a weird bunch, different ages and different hometowns. It’s not clear anymore how we know each other. It’s hot in Texas, but we still end up around a firepit.

We’re there to talk about writing. There are cold beers, cheeseburgers, and a short lesson about a writer or an idea. I usually disagree with something and stir up a tussle. We jot notes, but we don’t publish much of what we write. The fire offers a tangible reminder of what we’re doing: creating white pages with black ink that will either outlive us or burn up into smoke.

I leave with a buoyant feeling, ready to work. There’s nothing so beautiful as the written word. I can do it: I can put on a pot of coffee and produce something.

At home, I sit at my desk, wobbly and missing a screw, and prepare to begin. I open the Google Doc. The cursor blinks back at me, once, twice, three times. I’ll start in a minute, I think. Let the coffee kick in. Before I know it, my Twitter feed is open and scrolling, words flying past my eyes.

Other writers are succeeding, Twitter tells me. Other writers are amassing hundreds of thousands of followers, earning a legitimacy that will help them pitch book deals and land magazine covers. Other writers are turning their work into businesses. He did it. And he did it. And she did it too. And him. And him. And HER! Other writers aren’t wasting time. They’re not eating cheeseburgers. They’re publishing, publishing, publishing. They’re pitching editors and tweeting quips and churning out blog posts. Other writers are playing the game.

Staring at my screen, tinkering with a silly little paragraph I’ve written and rewritten for six months, I’m consumed by doubt: What am I doing?

In 1944, C.S. Lewis gave a lecture to the students of King’s College at the University of London. He asked the students to consider what he called the “Inner Ring.” He described it like this: In any group, there is an ever-shifting circle of “insiders.” Who is on top? Who is well liked? Who has the smartest ideas? Who holds sway?

Inevitably, he said, we compare ourselves (outsiders) to members of the Inner Ring (insiders.) We want to be inside the ring. Anyone who has eaten in a high school cafeteria knows the feeling: “Everything would be so much better if I were just sitting over there.” An Inner Ring exists in every office, university, church, and bingo hall.

Part of Lewis’s definition of the Inner Ring was its subtlety. It’s never explicitly clear who is inside. This keeps everyone on their toes; the rules are always changing. The top dog yesterday might be an outcast tomorrow.

In 2021, we can watch the Inner Ring of creative work shift and transform in real time, right in the palms of our hands. Who went viral today? Who had the best Substack post? Who landed a book deal?

Those of us watching (outsiders) are driven to emulate those succeeding (insiders.) We can touch their success with our fingertips. We’re drawn to chase after it: How can we do what they’re doing? The only way to get into the digital Inner Ring is to try. Throw open the doors: Show the world what you’re working on. Publish that draft. Send that tweet. Launch that newsletter. Let everyone in to have a look around, then change and iterate your work with their feedback. Let popularity be your guide.

Across the industry, the incentives of creative work are changing. Long confined to the halls of Ivy League universities, Hollywood agencies, and Manhattan publishing houses, creative work is now available to anyone with a laptop and WiFi. The gatekeepers have been disrupted. Attention, rather than clout or connections, is what matters now.

With frictionless distribution, creative people are no longer incentivized to please art critics or book reviewers. They aren’t incentivized to toil for a decade in isolation, tossing manuscripts into the wastebin, ripping through paragraphs with red ink. They are incentivized to create—as much as possible. Film a YouTube video every week. Photograph an Instagram post every day. Write constantly on Substack, publish and iterate at a fast clip. Why edit? The more you post, the more likely it is that the algorithms will shift in your favor, eyeballs collecting like fireflies in your digital net.

It’s advantageous to share your work—and your every thought—with as wide an audience as possible. You don’t need to hone the perfect manuscript. Just put stuff out there. Increase your surface area. Build in public. Audiences will tell you what they want, and then you can create more of it.

I read this advice on Twitter, and it follows me long after I close my laptop. I climb into the shower and the doubt comes with me, unable to be washed away. Should I spend more time building an audience? Publishing data is abysmal: 98% of books sell less than 5,000 copies. Why write something if no one buys it? The reality is, you have to fight for your own readers.

But with an audience comes scrutiny, and with scrutiny comes insecurity. David Perell, a man with 209,000 Twitter followers, put it this way: “Every sentence is scrutinized until soon, we get stuck in a prison of fear and risk-aversion.” Building in public means thinking in public, and thinking in public means exposing all of your quirks and questions to the smoothing waves of likes and clicks.

How could you ever write anything interesting with 209,000 people watching?

The upside, the hopeful promise of the new creative era, is one of meritocracy: It doesn’t matter where you went to school. It doesn’t matter who your dad was, or wasn’t. It only matters if you’re good.

But that brings up a troublesome question: When it comes to creative work, what is good?

On TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Substack, free markets offer an answer for those of us keeping score. Whose work is good? Well, whoever’s work makes the most money. Check any economics textbook: Price is the best indicator of value. “Charli D’Amelio is making a lot of money. She must be good.” Amazon spent $8.4 billion for “high quality storytelling.” Those movies must be good. Strong writing isn’t just a hobby at places like Andreesseen Horowitz and Coinbase, it’s core to their business. Today’s smartest MFA students will be paid six figure salaries to “craft narratives.” Will that work be good?

Good means lucrative. Good means popular.

The result of this thinking—pervasive across the Internet economy—is a dreary one: “This system culminates in the muddled median of everyone on earth’s most average tastes,” writes Vox’s Rebecca Jennings: “What we’re seeing is the lowest common denominator of what human beings want to look at, appealing to our most base impulses... The result is, well, mediocre.”

From Business Insider reporter Kat Tenbarge: “Mediocrity sells.”

The algorithmic flattening of creative work isn’t just happening on TikTok. It’s happening anywhere creatives are incentivized to prioritize popularity over ingenuity, writes John Logan, a screenwriter for the James Bond films (which are now held within Amazon’s catalog.)

“From my experience, here’s what happens to movies when [commercial] concerns start invading the creative process: Everything gets watered down to the most anodyne and easily consumable version of itself. The movie becomes an inoffensive shadow of a thing, not the thing itself. There are no more rough edges or flights of cinematic madness. The fire and passion are gradually drained away as original ideas and voices are subsumed by commercial concerns, corporate oversight and polling data.”

This is the price of chasing the Inner Ring. The desire to be likeable—to win entrance into the upper echelons of the attention marketplace, to be noteworthy and taken note of, to make a hit movie or write a best-selling book—provokes the same reaction from anyone who harbors it: inescapable mediocrity.

If you want to be in the Inner Ring, you’ve already lost.

The incentives driving creative work matter. It’s just as important why you create something as it is _what _you create. A story written only for profit, attention, or fame won’t be much of a story at all.

“The aim of art [is] to ask the big questions,” writes the author George Saunders. “How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?”

The work of a writer is to take those questions seriously. To take your work seriously. To take the chemical reaction happening in the hearts and minds of your readers seriously. Again, from George, “That’s what an artist does: takes responsibility.”

So what should we do? C.S. Lewis, as always, knew the answer to the question before he asked it. “The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it,” he explained. “But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it.”

Just work. That’s it. Focus on what stirs you up inside, what is beautiful and true. Work on making something good—not something that is liked. Take responsibility. The work will lead you home.

Sitting around that campfire in Austin, studying the pages of writers I admire with friends and neighbors I admire, none celebrities and none trying to be, I knew: I’d already made it into the only circle that matters.

---

_Ali Montag is a writer that lives in Austin, Texas. Her work has previously appeared in CNBC, Austin Chronicle, NBC, Miami Herald, and McClatchy DC—and her newsletter is amazing__.You can follow Ali on Twitter: @alimontag

-"The Inner Ring of The Internet "

[extratone]

Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow):

There's lots of versions of this narrative and it makes me sad every time.https://t.co/ZysZn3BYrA

[extratone]

"The Great Online Game"

By Packy McCormick ''

---

Welcome to the 1,265 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since last Monday! Join 47,388 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

---

Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Rows

_In March, I wrote that Excel Never Dies. I may have spoken too soon. Rows very much wants Excel to die. It has a shot: Rows is one of the most “Holy shit 🤯” new product experiences I’ve had in a long time._

_Rows is a spreadsheet powered by APIs, with built-in integrations that let you enrich mailing lists, learn what’s in a company’s tech stack, find company data via Crunchbase, and much more, right in the spreadsheet. They even made me a template to monitor trending tweets on topics I’m writing about. _

Plus, the spreadsheets are always ready to share: beyond just collaborating with others, anyone can transform their spreadsheets into interactive web apps in one-click. Anyone can build forms, models, and internal tools out of a spreadsheet without having to code.

_Everything in Rows is formula-based. It’s kind of like if Excel, Airtable, and Zapier had a baby, plus access to databases that normally live behind paywalls._

It’s really incredible already, and it’s still in beta. Rows wants Not Boring readers -- people who love finance & tech -- to be among the early adopters. You should just try it for yourself, on me:

Try Rows for Free

---

Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy belated Mother’s Day to all the not boring moms!

Most of the time at Not Boring, I write about companies, with facts and figures and histories and graphs. Occasionally, I’ll write about concepts and business models, like the Metaverse, DAOs, or APIs. Sometimes, I’ll let you into my brain to see what’s going on in there before an idea is fully baked, when its just a bunch of wisps starting to form a braid.

Today is one of those pieces. It’s shorter. It’s meant to be interactive. Most of the fun will happen when you take the idea and try to apply it to your own work or life.

To be clear, much of today’s essay is based on my own personal experience. I fully understand that not everyone has the luxury of having a roof over their head, food on the table, and an internet connection. Many people can’t afford the time to play the game.

But if you take the hours it takes to read Not Boring, you’re probably already playing the Great Online Game to some degree. You read this because you want to know how the online economy works, and how you can play it better. But you can’t play to win unless you know you’re playing.

Let’s get to it.

---

The Great Online Game

This didn’t start as a piece about games. I set out to answer this question: why are tech growth stocks sagging while crypto moons and value roars back?

But I figured out how to explain that out in way fewer words:

Crypto is just more fun.

But crypto itself is not the game. It’s just the in-game currency for a much bigger game, played across the internet, that involves CEOs, influencers, artists, researchers, investors, and regular people, like you and me. That’s a much more fun topic to explore than which asset class is outperforming which. This is bigger, more permanent than day-to-day market fluctuations.

We’re all playing a Great Online Game. How well we play determines the rewards we get, online and offline.

The Great Online Game is played concurrently by billions of people, online, as themselves, with real-world consequences. Your financial and psychological wellbeing is at stake, but the downside is limited. The upside, on the other hand, is infinite.

Social media is the clearest manifestation of this meta-game. Beginner-level Twitter feels weird, like a bunch of people exposing their personal thoughts to the world. Medium-level Twitter is Threads and engagement hacks. Twitter Mastery is indistinguishable from an ongoing game. This is also true for Reddit, Discord, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and other social networks.

But social media is just one piece of an interconnected game that spans online and offline spaces. The way you play in one area unlocks opportunities in others. Sharing ideas on Twitter might get you invited to a Discord, your participation in that Discord might get you invited to work on a new project, and that new project might make you rich. Or it might bring you more followers on Twitter and more Discord invites and more project opportunities and new ideas that you want to explore which might kick off any number of new paths.

We now live in a world in which, by typing things into your phone or your keyboard, or saying things into a microphone, or snapping pictures or videos, you can marshall resources, support, and opportunities. Crypto has the potential to take it up a notch by baking game mechanics -- points, rewards, skins, teams, and more -- right into the whole internet.

The Great Online Game is free to play, and it starts simply: by realizing that you’re playing a game. Every tweet is a free lottery ticket. That’s a big unlock.

Anyone can play. You can choose how to play given your resources and skills at the current moment. You can level up fast. Financial and social capital are no longer tied so tightly to where you went, who you know, or what your boss thinks of you. This game has different physics and wormholes through which to jump. It’s exponential instead of linear.

To understand how the game works and how to play, we’ll work our way up:

• What is a Video Game?

• The Great Online Game

• Meet the Players

• How Crypto Supercharges the Game

• How to Play the Game

By the end of this post, I hope I’ve convinced you to throw a couple coins in and start playing, but I think I might need to show you that we’re even playing a video game first.

What is a Video Game?

It’s Monday morning. You’re tired. You have to go to work. You have an assignment that you pushed off on Friday, because it’s practically Hot Vax Summer and you had plans, but now it’s Monday and damn. Now you need to do that thing. This does not seem fun. This does not seem like a game.

So it might take me a minute to convince you that yes, it is, even for you. I’m going to start my argument like a shitty high school valedictorian:

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a video game as, “A game played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a television screen or other display screen.”

If you’re working remotely from a computer, what you’re doing perfectly fits the definition of a video game.

Nik Milanovic nailed it:

Sometimes it's weird to remember that we're all effectively competing to hit the right keys on our keyboards in the right order, and that if we do it for long enough we can buy a house.

Hit the right keys in the right order, make money. Work is just an often boring sub-game within the meta-game.

But that’s still a little literal, and a lot reductive. Let’s go deeper. The best games, according to gaming entrepreneur turned top solo investor Josh Buckley, “are creating spaces that bring you into flow.”

On Invest Like the Best, Buckley said:

The biggest games today really take advantage of this, but you wouldn't actually think of them as a game. I look at Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as games and 3 billion people are playing them actively. They're essentially big layers on top of a slot machine.

Buckley went on to lay out four elements of successful game design:

1. Frequent Feedback Loops

2. Variable Outcomes

3. Sense of Control

4. Connection to a Meta-Game

All four are present in the Great Online Game, none more importantly than the connection to the meta-game.

The Great Online Game

“The internet is incredible.” You’ll hear that a lot from people who’ve started to master the Game. As I typed that last sentence, Blake Robbins tweeted this:

I think people still underestimate the power of the internet. Twitter, specifically, has changed my life in so many ways. I’ve met some of my closest friends, mentors, etc. all through Twitter.

Getting good at the Great Online Game makes seemingly absurd things happen. Your business icon? In your DMs. That person whose videos you don’t miss? Just reached out for a collab. Your dream job? Reaching out to you to tell you why Company X might be a fit.

Blake has successfully translated “hanging out on the edges of the internet” into a career as a venture capitalist at Ludlow Ventures. He’s a go-to source on creators, gaming, and future internet stuff more broadly for some of the smartest people in the world. Blake summarized his approach in another recent tweet:

He’s playing an infinite game, going down rabbit holes, learning, helping people, meeting new ones, going down more rabbit holes, and so on.

James Carse, who coined the term in his 1986 book Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, wrote:

The infinite game - there is only one - includes any authentic interaction, from touching to culture, that changes rules, plays with boundaries and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game. A finite player seeks power; the infinite one displays self-sufficient strength. Finite games are theatrical, necessitating an audience; infinite ones are dramatic, involving participants...

The Great Online Game is an infinite video game that plays out constantly across the internet. It uses many of the mechanics of a video game, but removes the boundaries. You’re no longer playing as an avatar in Fortnite or Roblox; you’re playing as yourself across Twitter, YouTube, Discords, work, projects, and investments. People who play the Great Online Game rack up points, skills, and attributes that they can apply across their digital and physical lives. Some people even start pseudonymous and parlay their faceless brilliance into jobs and money.

The Game rewards community and cooperation over individualism and competition. You get points for being curious, sharing, and helping with no expectation of reciprocation. By increasing your surface area, you’re opening yourself up to serendipity. For good actors, the Game has nearly unlimited upside, and practically no downside.

You can jump into the Great Online Game at any point, whether as a total unknown or an accomplished person, and start building the world that you want to build. It can take you on any number of paths. We’ll explore a few.

Meet The Players

The inspiration for this essay was Elon Musk’s SNL appearance. No one plays this game better than Musk. The best way to explain his out-of-body run is that he’s playing a video game with cheat codes.

He’s doing things that people didn’t think were physically possible -- see: Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink -- while getting away with things that people didn’t think were legal -- see: pumping Dogecoin, $420 take-private tweet, getting high on Joe Rogan.

Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.

He’s playing a postmodern game against modern rivals. He’s like Neo. He’s not trying to forcefully bend the spoon; he understands there is no spoon. He has more money points than all but two people in the world to show for it.

Musk plays an advanced version of the Game in which he builds rocket ships and electric cars and internet satellites, but you don’t need to bend atoms or become the wealthiest person in the solar system to win. You don’t even have to reveal yourself as a real person.

A couple weeks ago, Austin Rief and I had Bored Elon Musk on our weekly Twitter Spaces show, Spaces Cadets. Bored Elon is a pseudonymous account. He tweets ideas for inventions that Elon might have if he were bored, and 1.7 million people follow him on Twitter. A couple months ago, he started selling NFTs. He pulled in $1 million in less than a month. How about a non-Elon example?

Take Alex Danco. Alex has literally built himself a world: Dancoland. In an excellent post on his journey, Alex drew an actual map of his journey through the Great Online Game.

He started by writing about startups, moved on to bubbles and mania, passed through the Swamp of Scenes, and made it to the Humanities Mountain Range. While he wrote, he got to meet new people, test new ideas, and build up a reputation. It helped him find his next thing. “This newsletter was obviously part of a fishing expedition to find what I wanted to do next.” Next was a dream job at Shopify, thanks in part to the newsletter.

Instead of claiming MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, though, he’s continuing to play the Great Online Game, expanding his world by branching into new communities. Specifically, he’s going to have a recurring segment on Jim O’Shaughnessy’s Infinite Loops podcast and become a more active participant in Anna Gat’s magical Interintellect. Those will no doubt lead to new opportunities and new worlds to explore.

Or take Megan Leeds.

This is Megan Leeds, better known as MeganPlays. In 2018, Megan was making $400/month posting YouTube videos of herself gaming. Today, she takes in millions of dollars a year, has 3.6 million subscribers, & launched a game studio that will bring in $8 million this year. 👇👇👇

Leeds parlayed YouTubes of herself literally playing video games -- The Sims -- into Roblox content into making games into a 1mm+ YouTube following, $8mm game studio, and a $1mm online store. Her quote in Rex Woodbury’s thread captures the Great Online Game beautifully:

There’s nothing I’ve done that anybody else can’t do. It’s about learning—learning the code, learning how the game works, & creating. All you have to do is start.

Start, follow your curiosity, build relationships, stay open to new opportunities, keep playing.

How about Lil Nas X? Born Montero Hill after the Mitsubishi Montero, Lil Nas X started messing around on Facebook, Instagram, and finally, “hopped on Twitter ... where I really was a master. That was the first place where I could go viral.”

He started making music in his closet, and in December 2018, he dropped Old Town Road, which he made with a $30 sample and $20 worth of studio time. The song was played over 2.5 billion times in 2019 alone. He came out on the last day of Pride Month in 2019, and has used his platform to represent the LGBTQ community as one of the very few out rappers. Earlier this year, he released Montero (Call Me By Your Name). He gives the Devil a lap dance in the music video.

Montero to memes to music to Montero. Lil Nas X continues to use Twitter like a young memelord. He’s playing the Game.

The Great Online Game overlaps with the Creator Economy -- Danco wrote a newsletter, Leeds had a YouTube channel, Lil Nas X makes music -- but it doesn’t necessarily mean living as a full-time creator. Danco has a full-time job, Leeds runs companies with employees.

There are countless more examples, from Kim Kardashian to Donald Glover to Turner Novak to Andrea Hernandez to Harry Stebbings to AOC to Web Smith to DeepFuckingValue to Soulja Boy to the Extended Pompliano Universe. All these people seem like they’re having a blast while they’re “working.”

And that’s just my corner of the internet. There are millions of people playing the Game well.

What are come examples of people who've parlayed being great at the internet into big things?

Each one is internet-native, each plays the Game, and each has cashed out some internet points for things like TV shows, Grammy-winning records, venture funds, companies, and political victories. It’s less about a particular platform or outcome, and more about the idea that there are different ways of playing the game and new ways to acquire and grow new types of assets. Like cities.

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez became a Twitter darling last year when he decided to embrace the tech community.

[How can I help?

delian @zebulgar

ok guys hear me out, what if we move silicon valley to miami

](https://twitter.com/FrancisSuarez/status/1335037068108554241?s=20)

Since responding “How can I help?” to Delian’s tweet in December, Suarez has pulled a ton of high-growth companies into his city. He’s become the go-to example of how to grow a city by playing the Great Online Game. Not surprisingly, he’s also embraced crypto.

With crypto’s ascent, there are thousands of newly-minted millionaires, and dozens or hundreds of billionaires, who built their fortunes by hanging out in Discords, learning about and investing in new coins, playing with new protocols, and treating investing like a game. Millions of people are playing the Game just by hanging out and watching.

I have multiple friends who, a couple months ago, had normal jobs at startups. Then they started hanging out in crypto Discords and Telegrams, trading, learning, meeting people, tweeting, and going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. I can’t imagine they’ll ever work in a non-crypto job from here on out.

Crypto is an asset class that rewards participation in the Great Online Game. The fastest way to understand what’s legit and what’s not, and which coins people are going to buy and which they’re going to ignore, is to spend time participating and learning online. The right Discord or Twitter follow is a massive source of alpha.

Plus, crypto is kind of the native token for the Great Online Game.

How Crypto Supercharges the Game

People in crypto seem to understand better than anyone that this is all a game. The right meme can send a random coin to the moon and make people legitimately rich.

But beyond that, crypto is in-game money for the internet. It rewards participation directly. Early users, supporters, builders, stakers, validators, and community members get tokens.

Until now, I didn’t fully understand social tokens. They seemed like another way for influencers to monetize with no clear value. But in the context of the Great Online Game, they’re points that reward good gameplay across the internet, and give followers an incentive to join and support a team anywhere it goes. It’s like a Super Follow for the whole internet, with financial rewards.

Crypto also lets players exchange value directly. Recently, I experimented with selling an essay as an NFT, which Clint Kisker bought for 2.19 ETH. That’s a direct connection between two players in the Game. Even though I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, and even playing with, NFTs, though, it didn’t really click for me until I saw these slides from Mirror’s Patrick Rivera:

The Great Online Game imitates video games. If people want to buy skins in Fortnite to express themselves, or clothes in meatspace to do the same, of course they’d want to buy NFTs to express themselves online. In an open world like the internet, the more you signal who you are and what you care about, the more you open yourself up to new possibilities. It’s an abundant game. NFTs are online art, cars, outfits, and houses. They’re the digital trappings of digital wealth.

DAOs, too, are going to be important infrastructure for the Great Online Game. They make it easier for people to float in and out of projects at internet speed instead of committing to climb the ladder within a company, and allow for lightweight and temporary groupings when people want to combine their superpowers. Recently, PartyDAO formed to bring a bunch of smaller players together to compete against rich whales in NFT auctions.

I suspect that many of the most successful web3 projects built in the coming years will serve to give the Great Online Game tools that were previously only available within the walled gardens of specific virtual or corporate worlds. I’m excited about and / or an investor in Crucible, Mirror, Seed Club, and Opolis to name a few.

The Great Online Game is only going to get more compelling. We’re in the early innings. So how should you play?

How to Play the Game

On Friday, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein joined us on Spaces Cadets. To close out the conversation, we asked him for his advice to potential entrepreneurs out there:

"The cost of failure is as close to zero as it's ever been in the history of the world." @harleyf to the potential entrepreneurs out there

That’s a key mental shift. The cost of failure is as close to zero as it’s ever been, and it will continue to fall. That’s true for entrepreneurship, and it’s even more true for the Great Online Game. Because entrepreneurs are trying to build a business; when you start to play the Great Online Game, you’re just building optionality.

Anyone can play the Great Online Game. All you need is some knowledge and curiosity.

A typical path into the Game starts out in one niche community -- maybe you start thoughtfully replying to a few people you respect in your field on Twitter, or hop into a crypto Discord and get a feel for things before asking questions and participating. Ask yourself: “What am I nerdiest about?” and then go find your fellow nerds. They’re out there.

Over time, you go from consumer to creator. You write, make videos, lead discussions, build projects, collaborate on research, or just share your experience as a new player figuring it out. If you already have an offline reputation, maybe you skip the passive piece and jump right into activity.

In either case, be yourself, but play with your character attributes. You can choose to be someone who’s a little good at a lot of things, or unbelievably good at one thing. Both work, and you can evolve your character over time. Play with the fearlessness of someone playing a game, because you are. These are internet strangers. At worst, they’ll ignore you, and you can keep workshopping and start over; at best, they’ll open up new doors.

Once you’re in, the Game follows Buckley’s four elements of successful game design:

• Feedback Loops. Once you jump into the conversation or start sharing, you’ll start getting feedback. Don’t expect it to be much. A like here, a “great point!” there, maybe some questions and conversations. Pay attention to what’s working and what’s not, but don’t be too calculated about it. People can smell it. Your metric may not be likes or views; a real conversation with one person you respect might be the best starting point.

• Variable Outcomes. Some things will work, and some won’t. That’s OK. If you’re treating it like a game, that’s to be expected. The goal isn’t perfection, it’s experimentation. Play around, try new things; some will hit, some won’t. That’s part of the fun. It’ll keep you hungry.

• Sense of Control. In traditional game design, this means that the more you practice, the better you get, and the better your outcomes. It’s not easy. You get out what you put in. That’s doubly true in the Great Online Game, because you’re not just playing, you’re designing the game you want to play. Pick the things that you love the most and go deep. Learn, interact, give value with no expectation of anything in return, keep learning. There’s no boss in the Great Online Game; your success or failure is a direct result of your skill and effort.

• Connection to the Meta Game. I’m going to give this one its own non-bulleted paragraph. It’s important.

The Meta Game here is your life and your career. The more you evolve and level up, the more opportunities you’ll have. If you build up a following, meet the right people, and get involved with the right projects, you’ll have put yourself on an entirely new trajectory.

The fun part is, if you do it right, it really can feel like a game. Don’t take it too seriously. Don’t wait for the perfect moment to jump in. The vast majority of people reading this won’t want to quit your job and make a living entirely online; that doesn’t mean you can’t play. Play on the side, learn some things, build some new hobbies and relationships. Give yourself an insurance plan if things don’t work out in your job, and a supercharger if they do. You never know when it might come in handy, or what new path you might discover.

Important note: don’t be an asshole. It’s an easy way to get some followers early, and if you’re trying to game that metric, it might work, but it’s also the easiest way to lose your life in the Great Online Game.

I didn’t set out to play the Great Online Game when I started writing Not Boring, but that’s accidentally what I did. Two years ago, bored at my job, I started spending more time on Twitter and writing a newsletter. I just wanted to meet smart people who were interested in the same things I was. I never in a million years thought that my job would become playing the Great Online Game. But that’s what it’s become.

When people ask me my title, I don’t have a good answer. Writer? Founder? Investor? Some guy with a newsletter? They all fit, and I’m sure I’ll add more over time. Playing the Game is about having fun and opening doors that you didn’t even know existed.

It’s a lot of work, but it’s fun work, with exponential upside and compounding returns.

Go play.

---

Thanks to Dan, Dror, and Puja for editing!

---

How did you like this week’s Not Boring? Your feedback helps me make this great.

Loved | Great | Good | Meh | Bad

Thanks for reading and see you on Monday,

Packy

-"The Great Online Game"

[extratone]

"Goodbye, Fleets"

15-07-2021 14:01

On August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter. We built Fleets as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts. We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped. Because of this, on August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.

• Using our learnings from Fleets, we’ll focus on creating other ways for people to join the conversation and talk about what’s happening in their world. Here’s some of what we learned and what’s next:
• Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets and talk directly with others. We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter. And for the people who already are Tweeting, we’re focused on making this better for you.
• Most Fleets include media – people enjoy quickly sharing photos and videos to add to the discussion on Twitter. Soon, we’ll test updates to the Tweet composer and camera to incorporate features from the Fleets composer – like the full-screen camera, text formatting options, and GIF stickers. 
• The top of the timeline continues to be a good spot to highlight what’s happening right now so you’ll still see Spaces there when someone you follow is hosting or speaking in a live audio conversation. 
• Our Fleet ads test, which concluded as planned last month, was one of our first explorations of full-screen, vertical format ads. We’re taking a close look at learnings to assess how these ads perform on Twitter.

We’re evolving what Twitter is, and trying bigger, bolder things to serve the public conversation. A number of these updates, like Fleets, are speculative and won’t work out. We’ll be rigorous, evaluate what works, and know when to move on and focus elsewhere. If we're not evolving our approach and winding down features every once in a while –  we're not taking big enough chances. We’ll continue to build new ways to participate in conversations, listening to feedback and changing direction when there may be a better way to serve people using Twitter.

This Tweet is unavailable

---

==2335== Words

• Goodbye, Fleets

[extratone]

"Twitter, Be Twitter 🐣"

15-07-2021 14:02

Twitter’s Fleets feature didn’t work because the problem it was trying to solve with Fleets might actually be unsolvable. And that’s OK. We built Fleets as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts. We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped. Because of this, on August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.

More broadly, I wonder if this is a problem that really needs to be solved. Or is even solvable, honestly. I think the thing about Twitter is that it has evolved with the idea of the public discourse in mind, with most things public. Writing a tweet is actually significantly less work than building a fleet was. The real problem is that some people don’t want to be quite that public. Perhaps that’s not a flaw of the platform but a realistic point to focus your network’s growth. If people don’t want to share in that way, that’s a parameter you must work around.

Another announcement Twitter made this week—the ability to limit replies on a tweet after the fact—strikes me as a much better fit for the network, and might actually be a better solve for getting folks who aren’t engagers to engage.

When tweeting, there occasionally comes a point where something gets too much attention and goes too viral. It’s happened to me. It can be overwhelming, and users have had no way to control that until now. That’s honestly the thing that discourages people from tweeting a lot of the time—the risk that what they write will get noticed.

This reply-limiting feature effectively offers a way to cut a post’s virality off at any time. (It still allows quote tweets, alas, but it’s a start.) I hope they lean into that some more.

Ultimately, good on Team Twitter for taking risks. But perhaps consider risks that don’t look like retreads from other social networks.

---

==1901== Words

• Twitter, Be Twitter 🐣 | Revue

[extratone]

"Reply All | Gimlet"

''

---

ALEX GOLDMAN: Hey, quick announcement before we start the show: we are hiring! We are searching for a producer and a supervising editor to join our team. If you’d like to read more about the jobs or apply… go to www.replyallshow.com/jobs. Here’s the show.

[MUSIC]

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Alex Goldman.

ALEX: And this week, I wanted to invite my colleague Phia Bennin on a journey with me. Hello Phia Bennin.

PHIA BENNIN: Hello, Alex Goldman.

ALEX: Phia, I actually asked you on the show today because... one, you are cool and smart.

PHIA: Thank you. You are too.

ALEX: And two, I don’t think that you would disagree with me if... when I say that you are not like the most experienced Twitter user. And—

PHIA: No, I’m one of the worst.

ALEX: And I thought it would be fun to have you on, because today I have a story that is like, very much about Twitter.

PHIA: Cool. Yeah, I’m like, um, I have no right to be on Twitter even though I am.

ALEX: I mean, wha— everyone has a right to be on it.

PHIA: I haven’t earned it.

ALEX: I don’t know how to— I mean like, by, if you have to tweet to earn it, yeah, you haven’t really earned it.

PHIA: It’s like I have a house that I have the keys to, but I never go inside of.

ALEX: So I think you know that for the— that I am like a very regular Twitter user. I am a ver— I’m a power user I would say. I use it a lot.

PHIA: Yes, there are times during the workday that we’re like, “Is Alex tweeting right now?”

ALEX: Oh no.

PHIA: “Alex, pay attention. Stop tweeting. C’mon.” I sound like I’m talking to a puppy.

ALEX: When I— when that— when that’s happening, I have like, an idea that’s like, that’s like, “Shoehorns! I thought they were called trumpets!” or something, and I have to twee— like I suddenly have to tweet it. You know?

PHIA: Yeah.

ALEX: So Phia… today I have a story for you about a Twitter account that I have gotten extremely obsessed with because it is somehow able to defy the rules of Twitter. Like it shouldn't be able to exist.

_AND… _today's story is a Super Tech Support.

[MUSIC]

PHIA: I'm very excited.

ALEX: I'm going to be honest, you sound a little morose.

PHIA: Oh, no, no. What is better than like, just listening to you tell a story and not having to do any other work?

ALEX: Is that what you think this is? You, you—

PHIA: Yes.

ALEX: You don't have to do any of the lifting here?

PHIA: I've shown up. Tell me a story. I will enjoy it.

ALEX: OK. Well. We got an email from a listener named Ian. And the email started "this one will knock your socks off!” [LAUGHS] so I was immediately intrigued. And it was about this strange Twitter account that he'd discovered. So I gave him a call.

ALEX: Hi Ian.

IAN: Hello!

ALEX: How are you?

Ian is a student at Louisiana State University.

ALEX: What are you majoring in?

IAN: Physics and astronomy.

ALEX: Oh, man. That's— that gives me, like, heart palpitations.

[LAUGHING]

ALEX: It reminds me of, like—

_IAN: It gives me heart palpitations. _

ALEX: I can— if I can be honest with you— the one time I cheated on a test in college was in astronomy, because I knew I was going to fail if I didn't look at the paper of the person next to me. I was like—

IAN: Aww.

ALEX: I was like, I was like, I, I went into astronomy and I was like, “This is gonna be awesome. I'm going to learn about the atmosphere of other planets, space travel.” And all it is, is like the math of pinpointing objects in like a universe that's perpetually moving.

IAN: Yeah. Well, here's the question, though. Did you pass the test?

ALEX: I passed— I did great on the test because it wasn't my answers.

IAN: OK. Great.

ALEX: Uh, so, so, you, you wrote in to us, and I'm wondering if you can just tell me a little bit about, like, the, your experience of finding the account that you, that you contacted us about.

IAN: Sure. OK, so this account is a Twitter account with absolutely no Twitter handle. It shows the @, like is in front of every other Twitter handle, but there's nothing after that, and there's no name.

ALEX: So, you know, like my, my username on Twitter is @AGoldmund.

PHIA: So the handle, not the, not the like, name that shows up, like—

ALEX: Not the display name, because my display name is Alex Goldman. My username is AGoldmun- @AGoldmund. And this person's username is just @. There's just an @ there.

PHIA: Just an @. It's like the, the rest of it had vanished.

ALEX: Right.

ALEX: Can you explain the way you found it?

IAN: Yeah. So the @ account had promoted one of it's tweets and there was—

[ALEX LAUGHING]

ALEX: They paid money to, for- for people to find it?

IAN: Yeah. And another Twitter account, uh, that is the sole purpose of taking screenshots of really weird promoted tweets and then posting that on Twitter had found that tweet. And then in the thread under that, somebody had linked one of the @ account's tweets. And then from there I found the account.

Alex: I mean, what’s crazy about this account with no username is that when Ian first emailed me about it, I tried to find it, and I couldn't even access it on my computer. Like, Ian included a link in his email, and I kept trying to go to it, but you _can't _go to it, because—

PHIA: It doesn't like, go to the next screen.

ALEX: It does— It'll just say like, "Something went wrong,” and you can't—

PHIA: Oh...

ALEX: Get to the tweet.

PHIA: Is this true— like could— does somebody have the email @gmail.com?

ALEX: I don't think so. How do you email that person? That's the thing, is like, how do you go to @'s Twitter account? Because for starters you can't search for them...and like, if I were to go to the URL for my Twitter account, it's Twitter dot com slash AGoldmund. A-G-O-L-D-M-U-N-D. If you have no username, what do you just go to… Twitter dot com slash nothing?

PHIA: Oh, I see. I see.

ALEX: That takes you straight to the main page. Like it just—

PHIA: Yes.

ALEX: This Twitter account, like, breaks Twitter—

PHIA: But exists on Twitter?

ALEX: But still exists.

[MUSIC]

IAN: It's sort of like an exclusive club. So if, if you know somebody that has access to the account, you can have access, but otherwise you will not find this account.

ALEX: So the only way that someone could conceivably find this account is if someone else links to it, right?

IAN: Exactly. Yeah.

ALEX: Basically, there’s no way to see this account just like, operating in the wild on Twitter.

PHIA: Mm-hmm.

ALEX: You can’t search it. You can’t retweet it. Like, the only way you could stumble upon the account is if someone, if someone you follow replies to the account for some reason. Then it will show up in your timeline.

This account to me has the feeling of like, one of those special, beautiful places that isn't on a map, and you only find out about it because like, someone heard about it from someone who heard about it from someone. Like, in my case, I was only actually able to see this account when I took a link that Ian sent me in an email and opened it up on my phone. Because for some reason, it did not work on my computer. Like—

PHIA: That's so weird.

ALEX: Uh, yes, for whatever reason it will not load on a, on a, on a, on a laptop or desktop computer.

PHIA: So it’s like a weird little portal glitch?

ALEX: Totally.

PHIA: Wow.

ALEX: And, to me, this is like, my dream Twitter account.

PHIA: Why?

ALEX: I mean, as you know, I use Twitter a lot.

PHIA: Mm-hmm. I do know that.

ALEX: And for, and for whatever reason, quite a few people follow me and read all of the dumb things that—

PHIA: Like, tens of thousands of people follow you.

ALEX: …pour out of my head, yeah.

PHIA: Is it more than that? Is there— does 100,000 people follow you?

ALEX: Yeah. It’s 100-something.

PHIA: Wow.

ALEX: I mean, but the thing is, like, I’m always tweeting on the pretense that like, I’m connecting with the world and like— and people are very nice, but it just feels really empty.

PHIA: Yeah.

ALEX: And so, sometimes I’m just like, really embarrassed of the— my need for that connection and like, my insistence on trying to get it. So I’ll just like, delete all of my tweets and take Twitter off of my phone.

PHIA: Mm-hmm.

ALEX: Um, but I also have this constant compulsion to be on Twitter for like, the tiny drip of validation that it gives me. So that’s why this account would be perfect for me. It’s like, simultaneously on Twitter and not on Twitter. It’s like, hard to find and hard to retweet. Like, the idea of being this hard to find on Twitter feels really nice to me.

PHIA: That makes sense to me.

ALEX: Sounds perfect.

PHIA: So is your theory that like this account belongs to like one of the original employees of Twitter, or like Jack Dorsey, or like—

ALEX: I had no idea cuz the thing is that if you, if you finally make it to the account, if you are determined enough to actually make it to the account, this person… part of the reason that Ian was so interested in it is because whoever is tweeting or whatever is tweeting from this account, the tweets are very weird. Like random things without context, like "aerodynamic milk," or just tweeting the word "livestream."

Like, they almost—

PHIA: Oh.

ALEX: They almost feel like they could be written by a computer—

PHIA: Like a bot?

ALEX: —’cause they're so weird.

Like, one thing that this that this account did for a while was just tweet Twitter polls. Do you know what a Twitter poll is?

PHIA: Alex, the way you talk to me, it's like I don't know anything about Twitter. Which is fair, but I do know, I do know Instagram and everything you're saying, I just go like "Instagram, got it.”

ALEX: Oh, okay.

PHIA: I'm not so doo-doo stupid.

ALEX: To be perfectly fair, I know nothing about Instagram, so I don't know if they have polls.

PHIA: I'm surprised you haven't done a poll on Instagram, ‘cause the things you do on Instagram just feel like, invading my Instagram with your Twitter. And I don't think I've ever liked anything you’ve posted to Instagram, ‘cause I just feel like I'm not on Twitter because I'm opting out of like, Internet Alex. Like, I find your internet personality very confusing?

ALEX: Well, I’m sorry, okay?

PHIA: I like— I find your day to day personality very enjoyable.

ALEX: Um, but, but some other, some other things that, that—I’m just, I’m just not gonna— [PHIA LAUGHS] I mean, what do you want me to say? I think they’re both awesome.

PHIA: No. [LAUGHS] Okay, keep going, sorry.

ALEX: Anyway, the account tweets a bunch of polls, but instead of the options being actual choices, like, “What's better, ponies or horses?” or whatever, the, the options will be like, “68%” and “32%”, and then people can vote on those two percentages.

PHIA: Oh.

ALEX: It’s a really bizarre account. Sometimes it feels like it's just taking text from somewhere and like, reconfiguring it into non-sequiturs and tweeting it. But, but then there are things that feel like, oh, this is totally written by a real person.

PHIA: Like what?

ALEX: Like, well, I mean, the account posts a lot about soccer, specifically, a soccer team in Scotland called Kilmarnock FC. It also retweets an account called, uh, “The_Real_LeRoy” quite a bit, and that account I found out belongs to a guy named Martin Le Roy… And I, I am guessing that that is the owner of the @ account, of the no name account.

ALEX: Have you tried contacting him and saying like, "Hey, what's up with your account?"

IAN: Yeah, so, uh, I tried doing that through just tweeting at him, but a lot of people do that.

But then the account started following Ian… which was really confusing to Ian because besides him, this account only follows Elon Musk and a Youtuber.

IAN: At one point, he followed me, and he only follows VSauce and Elon Musk, so I thought it was really weird that I would be the third… I'm not even verified. So I reached out to him and said, "Hey, I'm very honored. Thank you. Why are you following me?" Uh, he had absolutely no idea. And then he said, like, "Sorry to break it to you, yeah, I'll unfollow you now because I don't really want to follow you." Um, and I tried to ask some more clarifying questions, and I never really got an answer. He's, he's a very mysterious guy, really hard to get a hold of.

ALEX: He is mysterious.

IAN: Yeah.

ALEX: He doesn't seem interested at all in explaining what's going on.

IAN: Uh, I had sent him a DM, and I said like, "Oh, there's this podcast. I've been listening to it for years, Alex Goldman. I'm sure he's going to want to talk to you. Do you want to talk to him?" And I started that message with "Hear me out." And then about an hour later he tweeted, "Hear me out." And he never responded to my message. So, I don't know what that means, but….

ALEX: And then the account blocked him.

PHIA: God.

[MUSIC]

ALEX: SO, SO, Ian wants to know what IS this account?

IAN: Thank you for meeting with me, I'm really curious to know what you can find.

And so I told him I'd do my best to figure it out.

ALEX: All right, man. Take care.

IAN: Bye, guys.

ALEX: Bye.

ALEX: So of course the first thing I did was try tweeting at the nameless account, like, "Hey, will you please do an interview with me?" Which didn’t work at all. Like, the account never responded. So, I, I looked up that guy, Martin Le Roy, who I think owns the account, and I found... and I found an account of his on another website, a website where he like, sells t-shirts that he designs.

PHIA: Okay.

ALEX: And so, I sent him a message there, and he did not reply.

PHIA: Great.

ALEX: Um, and, you know, I was, [LAUGHS] I was getting very frustrated.

PHIA: Yeah.

ALEX: Because I just wanted to know like, how do you get this account? Can I get one of my own? And they were stonewalling me. Um, but there was a person who saw me tweeting at the no-name account asking for an interview.

PHIA: Mm-hmm.

ALEX: Uh, uh, this guy named Austin Burk.

[MUSIC]

AUSTIN BURK: Test. Test. [SINGS] Butter butter butter butter. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

ALEX: Wow, I've never had someone give such a, such an amazing sound test before.

ALEX: He lives in Lansing, Michigan. He works for like, a web-hosting company.

AUSTIN: And what I do is I work on our internal systems to find ways to make them break in testing so that they don't break in the real world.

ALEX: That sounds kind of fun. I mean, I'd like to have a job where I try and break stuff all the time.

Austin said that coming across this account, he was immediately intrigued.

AUSTIN: This is the kind of thing that I live for. You, you put a mystery in front of me, and like, I will dive into it. I will drop everything else that I'm doing and just dive into it.

ALEX: He came to me with, like, a level of comprehensive knowledge of the way Twitter works, because of this account, that was like genuinely surprising to me.

AUSTIN: Here's the thing about that account with no username—

ALEX: Okay.

AUSTIN: It isn't— it isn't the only one.

ALEX: When you say it isn't the only one, tell me a little more, how many are we talking?

AUSTIN: Well, at first I found five or six, and then I started looking a little harder and that five or six went up to almost 2000. And while I haven't been able to get all the IDs for them, it's looking like that might be even closer to 20,000.

PHIA: Wait, so you were focused on one, but there are many?

ALEX: Yes. Which was exciting to me because Martin’s account wasn’t getting back to me. And I was like, well, if there’s thousands of these, maybe I could talk to someone else with one of these magic accounts.

PHIA: But if none of them have usernames, like, how do you know— how do you differentiate? Like, how do you know which one you’re reaching out to, or if you’re just like, reaching out to the same one over and over again?

ALEX: So, when I go to the Twitter website, I’m gonna look up an account by like my— the username. Like @AGoldmund or @PhiaBennin or whatever. But in addition to the username, Twitter tracks each account by giving it a unique number.

ALEX: That’s how you can, like, change your username but still have all your old tweets. Or in this case, how it’s possible to have _no _username, and still have a Twitter account.

PHIA: Right, like, cause it’s a computer that’s following things. It just thinks about things as numbers. It doesn’t care that you’re Alex Goldman.

ALEX: RIght. And so Austin was like, very helpful, ‘cause he knew how to look up Twitter accounts by their unique numbers.

[MUSIC]

AUSTIN: All right. Let's take a look here.

So, we were looking at this massive Excel spreadsheet of accounts with no username, and I’m like, reading off the unique number for each account to Austin.

ALEX: Uh, let's do the next one. 58354621.

And Austin has this account called a Twitter Developer Account. You can apply with Twitter so that you can do sort of like, special searches on their data. And he would look up the number that I read to him and then tell me:

AUSTIN: It's almost certainly a bot account.

ALEX: Okay, so yeah, it’s auto-tweeting newsworthy stuff.

And we were able to figure out that like, out of the thousands of accounts that exist with no, no usernames, only six of them had tweeted in 2021. But they were all bots, just like, tweeting links to random articles or some other inane crap, with the exception of _ONE _account, which seemed to be active and actually being used by a human being. And that was the one that Ian found.

PHIA: I think it’s pretty amazing that the one real one is the one that you’ve been looking for.

ALEX: Yeah, I know, I mean— but also, no one would ever notice the ones that aren’t real. Right?

PHIA: Don’t diminish the magic.

ALEX: And, you know, like, I'm getting super frustrated, like, I'm like, you know, "We still have no— there's still no real information on how to contact this guy. Like, he's not getting back to me.” Um. So at the end of May, we have this team meeting of everyone working on this story... it's me, Lisa, Jessica, Hannah, and Tim. And we're all like, "OK, what do we do? How do we get this guy?” And we're- I mean, we’re getting desperate. So we start entertaining our editor Tim Howard’s total bong hit ideas—

PHIA: Some of the best kind.

ALEX: Yeah, absolutely.

TIM: Or the other possibility is Alex figures out some sort of way to do a non-creepy valentine thing related to the Kilmarnock Football Club and then sends that in like, an email.

HANNAH: Can you, like, tweet the valentine at him?

ALEX: I could. I could, I'm sure.

ALEX: And while we’re throwing these ideas around, like, ways to get this account's owner to reply to me, producer Jessica Yung, she, she has this sudden realization why this person is not replying. She was like, "Alex, didn't you deactivate your Twitter?"

And I was like, "Yeah, I did," because I had actually deactivated my account at the beginning of April.

PHIA: Mmhmm.

ALEX: And so Jessica_ — _who knew that I had deactivated my Twitter account — was like, "Are you tweeting at them, what account are you tweeting at them from?" And I was like, "well," and I was like “uhhh,” and she was like, "Are you tweeting at them from the Reply All account?" And I was like, "no." She was like, "Are you tweeting at them from your band's account?"

PHIA: Ohhhhh.

ALEX: So I have an account for my band, which has like 500 followers. It doesn't have a picture of my face on it.

PHIA: Wow, OK, so you weren't tweeting— Oh. What's your band's name, your “band?”

ALEX: You don't know that— we're called Slow Fawns.

PHIA: We— who's the we.

ALEX: Me and… me. It's me. I mean—

PHIA: You’re called Slow Fawns.

ALEX: I'm called Slow Fawns. Slow Fawns is plural.

PHIA: Well, it shouldn't be plural. You're a Slow Fawn. What, what’s on that Twitter account? How many tweets do you have? Is it all just like "Listen to this synth sound. It sounds like a fart."

ALEX: I mean a Twitter account is kind— the Twitter account is kind of like a combination of jokes that I tell, um, uh, music, and just like, total non sequiturs. Here, let me send you the Twitter.

PHIA: Okay, I got it. "I wish she'd Don'ta Lipa.” Uhh.. “Androids delight, floating further from the future eye, day by day."

ALEX: You're reading my tweets, just right now, because I think people probably are thinking you're just having a stroke.

PHIA: And you only first started tweeting here in April.

ALEX: Yeah.

PHIA: So you only made this account a couple months ago.

ALEX: Right. And Jessica, I think understandably, was like, "What are you doing? Why are you tweeting from that account?"

PHIA: Oh. Oh, you were like, "Why isn't this working? I'm so frustrated."

ALEX: You sound really disappointed to me. You sound so disappointed.

PHIA: It— It feels like— yes. This is the kind of thing that like, is frustrating. And that like nobody, nobody, knew to ask. We all thought you were tweeting from an account with like lots of people and instead you were doing it from such a weird place. You're so weird, Alex.

[MUSIC]

ALEX: So, you know, right then and there, I made the decision that like, the only way to solve this problem would be that I— to tweet at the mystery account from my personal account.

So, I reactivated. And it still had all my followers, but my timeline was totally blank, because I deleted everything. And I was like, "How am I gonna get this guy's attention? 'Cause it still seems weird that I don't have anything on my account.”

PHIA: Yeah. Right.

ALEX: And then I was like, "Well, this Martin Le Roy person, who I feel like must run this account, he’s definitely a shitposter, because he posts, you know, dumb, goofy stuff all the time."

PHIA: Okay.

ALEX: So I immediately started tweeting, uh—

PHIA: Your normal stuff.

ALEX: My normal stuff. I— My first tweet was like, “Enya? I haven’t even begun-ya!”

PHIA: That's pretty good. As your stuff goes, I like it.

ALEX: And then “Chewbacca more like spit front ya."

PHIA: No.

ALEX: Well, OK. And then immediately, like within the hour, I was back into my worst, attention-seeking Twitter behavior.

Like at one point, I quote tweeted an article from this uh, website called BGR. And the article said, the tweet said, "your future sex robot could be hacked and programmed to murder you." And I tweeted, "I don't even have a current sex robot!" Um… No? Nothing?

PHIA: No. No reaction. [ALEX LAUGHS]

ALEX_: _Um, but, you know, I mean, I spent the next several hours after that tweet justice, checking my notifications to see how that tweet was doing.

PHIA: What— did it get a good reaction?

ALEX: It did. People loved it.

PHIA: Really?

ALEX: Yeah. Um, but I mean, it just felt like a total relapse into my old habits.

PHIA: Yeah.

ALEX: Like, refreshing all day long, during work, after work, after the kids went to bed. Like, it was just — what I want — like, my dream is to stop having the experience of having members of my family talking to me while I’m checking Twitter and having to look up and go, “Huh? Can you say that again?”

PHIA: Mm-hmm.

ALEX: That feels pretty bad.

PHIA: Yeah, it’s like—

ALEX: I would like to be a little more present.

PHIA: It’s like you’d quit smoking and then you had a cigarette, and then you were like, I’m back to having a pack a day.

ALEX: Right. And, and I was, I was very mad about it. I mean like, mostly mad at myself about it, for like, falling right back into my old tweeting habits. But I mean, at the same time, I felt like, if I, if I ever need to contact anyone else, I'm gonna need to have this account up again.

PHIA: Yeah. So you just, you felt the like— you felt cornered. You were—

ALEX: Yeah.

PHIA: That's sad.

ALEX: I know.

But I got in touch with Martin!

The day after I reactivated my account, I tweeted at the noname account. And within a couple hours, it replied and said "I'll send you an email.”

After the break: the man with no name.

[MUSIC]

ALEX: So the day after I reactivated my personal Twitter account, the owner of the no-name account got back to me. And it was definitely not the master hacker I'd been expecting.

MARTIN LE ROY: So my name's Martin, and I am nobody of note, really. Well, I live in the northeast of England. I’m obviously originally from Scotland. And I just happened across a Twitter account which had no username for a very long period of time...

[MUSIC]

ALEX: So, when the account with no username fell into the hands of this, uh, self-described "nobody of note," he was in a very different part of his Twitter life journey than me.

Like, while, while I had spent the past couple years trying to wean myself off the need for Twitter validation, um, Martin has been trying to figure out how to become Twitter famous.

PHIA: Okay.

ALEX: And it seems like the account just like, fell into his hands almost as if like, by divine providence. It was like, one of many accounts that he has, like his fifth or sixth or seventh or something. He's not really sure. And he was going through the process of signing up...

MARTIN: And I was typing into the section where you pick your username. I was typing in random, just names of what I could select and see if they were available or not. I don't know if it still does, but like a tick was coming up next to it or a cross was coming up to say whether it was available or not. And to the best of my knowledge, what happened was that I had deleted the field. The field was empty. But the tick was there to say that it was an acceptable username. So I pressed next.

ALEX: [LAUGHS] You pre— and that, that was it? That's all it took?

MARTIN: And that was it. That's all it took.

[MUSIC]

So, I, I got in touch with Twitter, and I was like, “Hey, how was Martin able to create this account?”

And they were like, “There was a temporary bug in the code, and a lot of people made accounts like this.” But, uh, what they also told me was like, these accounts don’t work as like, normal accounts are intended to work. Like, they’re very buggy.

PHIA: Mmm.

ALEX: And so, pretty much everybody who got one was like, “Well, this doesn’t have a username, and it’s impossible to use. [LAUGHS] I’m not going to use it.” Um.

PHIA: Right. Except for Martin.

ALEX: Yeah, except for Martin.

Because Martin noticed that anytime someone was lucky enough to stumble across his account — like whether he'd replied to another tweet, or if someone had posted a screenshot of it, they would notice it and be like, oh, this is such a weird, cool account. I want to make sure I’m following it.”

PHIA: So he was collecting followers.

ALEX: He was collecting followers, and it didn’t matter how bad his tweets were. The account just like, had its own pull. It just felt to Martin like it could be huge.

MARTIN: Specifically, I was trying to hit over 30,000 followers because according to— in the UK, according to the Advertising Standards Agency, if you have over 30,000 followers on a social media platform, you are legally a celebrity. So that was, that was my aim. I just wanted to be over 30,000 followers, and then I wasn't bothered.

ALEX: Why did you want your Twitter account to be legally a celebrity?

MARTIN: I just wanted to be able to say, “I am technically a celebrity,” even though no one's ever heard of me and actually knows who I am.

ALEX: Martin had basically found the narrowest and most unglamorous path to celebrity I’ve ever heard of. I had to look this up, but this board in the UK that's actually called the Advertising Standards Authority made a ruling that said any account with over 30,000 followers counted as a celebrity for their purposes. And so that’s what Martin was aiming for.

PHIA: Right.

ALEX: But the first hurdle to Martin's plan was the account itself, because [LAUGHS] it— it’s not only hard to find, it’s like, impossible to use and is always breaking in sort of new and different ways.

MARTIN: For a very long period of time, I couldn't see my own tweets, so I would tweet, then I wouldn't be able to see it again. So I would have to, I would have, I would have to then log into my main account to see the replies to my tweets. And then if I wanted to reply to one of those, I would have to copy the link from— that I got from my main account, sign into my other— sign into—

ALEX: This is so complex.

MARTIN: ...the nameless account to get to to reply, to reply to it. So it was a big period of time where I wasn't replying to people very much because it was a bit of a lengthy process.

Martin started developing other strategies to up his exposure… like replying to Elon Musk tweets, which would usually get him some followers. But the most successful thing he tried — which is initially how he got the attention of Ian, who is our listener—

Phia: Right.

ALEX: ...is a sponsored tweet. And, the tweet that Martin promoted said, quote: "I seem to have lost my username. Can anyone help, please?"

PHIA: That's pretty cute.

ALEX: And it worked. In April, he ended up hitting 30,000 followers.

PHIA: He's a celebrity!

ALEX: He's a celebrity; he's made it. He has, you know, 30,000 people listening to every dada-esque joke he wants to make.

But like, Martin’s moment in the sun was sadly very, very brief. Because like, just a couple months ago, this weird thing started to happen where anytime he changed a setting on his account — like if he changed his Twitter bio or opened or closed his DMs, anything like that — for the next couple minutes, he would have a username.

[MUSIC]

PHIA: What would it be?

ALEX: Just complete gibberish: numbers and letters.

MARTIN:Then it disappeared very, very quickly. And I was like, "Right, what happened there? That was very strange."

ALEX: And then on the afternoon of May 22nd, he made a change to one of the settings on his account — he opened up his DM's so anyone could message him — and then another gibberish usernames appeared...but this time it stuck. And it hasn't gone away. And now Martin, instead of having a Twitter account with no username, has a twitter account with the username @OJAKSS7FV37SMVI.

So I have since learned why Twitter had to, in that moment, take the no-name account away.

PHIA: Okay.

ALEX: I talked to a former Twitter engineer whose name is Lisa Phillips, and her job at Twitter was to, like make sure — as Twitter scaled, as it got bigger — it wouldn’t break from all the people on it, basically. was to solve problems in Twitter’s code. And while she never encountered _this p_articular account when she worked there, when I told her about it, she was like, oh I could see why that was a nightmare for the engineers to deal with. Because what Martin doesn't know is that because this account is so fundamentally flawed, even the smallest interactions with it can generate errors that Twitter's engineers have to fix.

LISA PHILLIPS: Let’s say you’re going 10,000 followers every minute or whatever. You know, a celebrity or something. You have to update each one of those followers to show that they follow that person and the counts for each of them. That's— there's a lot of tasks that have to happen when you start thinking about how to interact between Twitter accounts. So yeah, I think once he started getting followers, it probably triggered errors.

PHIA: Wow. So every time he does anything, they get— they are like, notified. They know about it.

ALEX: They get error messages that may or may not directly point to his account. Like it's the, the—Twitter implied that it took some time to figure out how, what was going on. But these errors would pile up until they had to be dealt with by Twitter engineers. And Lisa said that as the account started to grow, there'd be more and more errors, and so the engineers would eventually have to find what was causing them. And I told her, like, "Well, he did do a promoted tweet, and that promoted tweet got him a bunch of new followers."

ALEX: He paid for a sponsored post.

LISA: [GASPS] No! And he was able to?

ALEX: That— he was as surprised as you are.

LISA: [LAUGHS]

ALEX: So that was the—

LISA: So he was, yeah, he was, he got that attention. Probably those errors flew through the roof and… yeah. He got triggered.

ALEX: That’s really interesting.

LISA: He probably could’ve just kept with that username for a really long time.

[MUSIC]

ALEX: It was like his very quest for fame that undid the thing that made him special.

PHIA: He flew too close to the sun.

ALEX: That’s exactly what I said. He’s Twitter’s Icarus.

PHIA: Yeah.

ALEX: What does it feel like to be the—part of the rest of us rabble these days?

MARTIN: Sad. As soon as I tweet anything now, it's like, "Dude, you've got a username." And it's like, "yeah, I know." Like I've got the, the thirty eight something thousand followers. Like what what, like, what do I do now? Because they're there because I was weird. Now I'm not weird, so what do I do with it now? And I'm at a loss, really.

ALEX: You're still tweeting?

MARTIN: I'm still tweeting. But it's—

ALEX: Has your heart gone out of it a little bit?

MARTIN: A little bit. Like it's just, it's not special anymore.

ALEX: Twitter's really just lost its shine for Martin, which I can relate to.

PHIA: What about you, Alex? Do you still have your Twitter account? Did you get rid of it?

ALEX: Nope. It’s still up. I’m still tweeting. Still feeling bad.

PHIA: Mmm.

ALEX: It sounds so ridiculous when I say it. It's like, I'm sure there are a million people listening to this being like, “Just stop tweeting.”

PHIA: Yes.

ALEX: But that’s— It’s very hard for me.

PHIA: I’m sorry.

ALEX: Am I allowed to get rid of it again?

PHIA: Yes! Absolutely! You don’t need to ask me. Just do whatever you want. Your job does not require you to have a Twitter account. You need to be creative enough that you can book pe— you can use the White Pages and book people without it. And you can't try to book people from a creepy account that only posts like, weird synth music. But like—

ALEX: I don't think it's a creepy account.

PHIA: I think you're a very smart person that— I don't think Slow Fawn is your answer. But I think that, like, you can figure out other ways to, uh, connect with the world, right?

ALEX: Yeah, I'm— yes.

[MUSIC]

ALEX: So you’re, you’re rolling, just to be clear.

PHIA: The record button is red.

ALEX: Okay.

PHIA: That’s the best I can say.

ALEX: So Phia, we talked— last talked on Thursday of last week.

PHIA: Yes, and now it is Tuesday.

ALEX: And I just wanted to let you know, um, that Saturday morning, I did deactivate my Twitter account. I was about to go— I was like, on my way to a, to a weekend trip to Sarah’s family to see a, a nephew get christened, and I wanted to like, I was like, I was like, “I bet that if I have this thing on I’ll probably compulsively check it during downtime, and just be like, Sarah’s weird rude husband who doesn’t talk to anybody.”

PHIA: Right.

ALEX: So I’d rather be Sarah’s not-rude husband who doesn’t talk to anybody. So I deactivated my Twitter account and immediately went outside...

[MUSIC]

[SOUNDS OF OUTSIDE, BIRDS]

ALEX: Can you show me how you go across the monkey bars?

POLLY: You never catch me, you never catch me!

...and played with Polly on a little jungle gym we have in the backyard.

ALEX: Whoa! Look at you, you’re hangin’.

POLLY: Wheee! That was fun!

ALEX: And I had this moment where I was just like, oh I'm fine — I'm not missing out on anything by not using Twitter.

PHIA: You seem really happy.

ALEX: Yeah.

PHIA: And Twitter-less.

ALEX: Ohhh, it feels so good.

[MUSIC]

This episode of Reply All was produced by Jessica Yung, Lisa Wang, and Hannah Chinn, with production assistance from Noor Gill. It was edited by Tim Howard. Additional help from the rest of the Reply All crew: Anna Foley, Damiano Marchetti, Emmanuel Dzotsi, and Phia Bennin.

We are hosted by Emmanuel Dzotsi and me, Alex Goldman. This episode was mixed by Rick Kwan, with fact checking by Isabel Cristo.

Music in this episode by Breakmaster Cylinder, Mariana Romano, Luke Williams, and Tim Howard. Special thanks to Bryan Haggerty, Marc Mims, Matt Dobbin, and Andrew Seigner.

Also, we’re always looking for more Super Tech Supports. If you’ve got a tech problem that’s causing real consequences in your life, email us at replyall@gimletmedia.com

Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you in two weeks.

-"Reply All | Gimlet"

[extratone]

"Opinion | Why People Are So Awful Online"

'Jul 17, 2021 at 12:00'

---

Why People Are So Awful Online

Jake Terrell

By Roxane Gay

Ms. Gay is a contributing Opinion writer. She was the editor, most recently, of “The Selected Works of Audre Lorde.” She is the author of the memoir “Hunger.”

When I joined Twitter 14 years ago, I was living in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, attending graduate school. I lived in a town of around 4,000 people, with few Black people or other people of color, not many queer people and not many writers. Online is where I found a community beyond my graduate school peers. I followed and met other emerging writers, many of whom remain my truest friends. I got to share opinions, join in on memes, celebrate people’s personal joys, process the news with others and partake in the collective effervescence of watching awards shows with thousands of strangers.

Something fundamental has changed since then. I don’t enjoy most social media anymore. I’ve felt this way for a while, but I’m loath to admit it.

Increasingly, I’ve felt that online engagement is fueled by the hopelessness many people feel when we consider the state of the world and the challenges we deal with in our day-to-day lives. Online spaces offer the hopeful fiction of a tangible cause and effect — an injustice answered by an immediate consequence. On Twitter, we can wield a small measure of power, avenge wrongs, punish villains, exalt the pure of heart.

In our quest for this simulacrum of justice, however, we have lost all sense of proportion and scale. We hold in equal contempt a war criminal and a fiction writer who too transparently borrows details from someone else’s life. It’s hard to calibrate how we engage or argue.

In real life, we are fearful Davids staring down seemingly omnipotent Goliaths: a Supreme Court poised to undermine abortion and civil rights; a patch of sea on fire from a gas leak; an incoherent but surprisingly effective attack on teaching children America’s real history; the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act; a man whom dozens of women have accused of sexual assault walking free on a technicality. At least online, we can tell ourselves that the power imbalances between us flatten. Suddenly, we are all Goliaths in the Valley of Elah.

It makes me uncomfortable to admit that I have some influence and power online, because it feels so foreign or, maybe, unlikely. My online following came slowly, and then all at once. For years, I had a couple hundred followers. Those numbers slowly inched up to a couple thousand. Then I wrote a couple of books, and blinked, and suddenly hundreds of thousands of people were seeing my tweets. Most of them appreciate my work, though they may disagree with my opinions. Some just hate me, as is their right, and they follow me to scavenge for evidence to support or intensify their enmity. Then there are those who harass me for all kinds of reasons — some aspect of my identity or my work or my presence in the world troubles their emotional waters.

After a while, the lines blur, and it’s not at all clear what friend or foe look like, or how we as humans should interact in this place. After being on the receiving end of enough aggression, everything starts to feel like an attack. Your skin thins until you have no defenses left. It becomes harder and harder to distinguish good-faith criticism from pettiness or cruelty. It becomes harder to disinvest from pointless arguments that have nothing at all to do with you. An experience that was once charming and fun becomes stressful and largely unpleasant. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way. We have all become hammers in search of nails.

One person makes a statement. Others take issue with some aspect of that statement. Or they make note of every circumstance the original statement did not account for. Or they misrepresent the original statement and extrapolate it to a broader issue in which they are deeply invested. Or they take a singular instance of something and conflate it with a massive cultural trend. Or they bring up something ridiculous that someone said more than a decade ago as confirmation of … who knows?

Or someone popular gets too close to the sun and suddenly can do nothing right. “Likes” are analyzed obsessively, as if clicking a button on social media is representative of an entire ideology. If a mistake is made, it becomes immediate proof of being beyond redemption. Or, if the person is held mildly accountable for a mistake, a chorus rends her or his garments in distress, decrying the inhumanity of “cancel culture.”

Every harm is treated as trauma. Vulnerability and difference are weaponized. People assume the worst intentions. Bad-faith arguments abound, presented with righteous bluster.

And these are the more reasonable online arguments. There is another category entirely of racists, homophobes, transphobes, xenophobes and other bigots who target the subjects of their ire relentlessly and are largely unchecked by the platforms enabling them. And then, of course, there are the straight-up trolls, gleefully wreaking havoc.

As someone who has been online for a long time, I have seen all kinds of ridiculous arguments and conversations. I have participated in all kinds of ridiculous arguments and conversations. Lately, I’ve been thinking that what drives so much of the anger and antagonism online is our helplessness offline. Online we want to be good, to do good, but despite these lofty moral aspirations, there is little generosity or patience, let alone human kindness. There is a desperate yearning for emotional safety. There is a desperate hope that if we all become perfect enough and demand the same perfection from others, there will be no more harm or suffering.

It is infuriating. It is also entirely understandable. Some days, as I am reading the news, I feel as if I am drowning. I think most of us do. At least online, we can use our voices and know they can be heard by someone.

It’s no wonder that we seek control and justice online. It’s no wonder that the tenor of online engagement has devolved so precipitously. It’s no wonder that some of us have grown weary of it.

I don’t regret the time I’ve spent on social media. I’ve met interesting people. I’ve had real-life adventures instigated by virtual relationships. I’ve been emboldened to challenge myself and grow as a person and, yes, clap back if you clap first.

But I have more of a life than I once did. I have a wife, a busy career, aging parents and a large family. I have more physical mobility and, in turn, more interest in being active and out in the world. I now spend most of my time with people who are not Very Online. When I talk to them about some weird or frustrating internet conflagration, they tend to look at me as if I am speaking a foreign language from a distant land. And, I suppose, I am.

The comments section is closed. To submit a letter to the editor for publication, write to letters@nytimes.com.

-"Opinion | Why People Are So Awful Online"

[extratone]

"Imperfect, by design"

''

---

And it’s been an amazing journey. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we got here…

We wanted an art-first approach to our brand identity that encompassed emotion and expression. So rather than build the system up from each component part or build around a specific element, we embarked upon building a creative design system that’s intentionally imperfect.

Instead of working with some of the larger, more well-known companies, we reached out to @AtelierIrradie in Paris. They had a global perspective, a portfolio of fashion and beauty, and a design aesthetic that we knew was right for what we wanted to do. They were great partners, and captured the attitude, vibe, and energy of Twitter.

Expression and emotion vary depending upon topic, mood, locale, or simply the tilt of the sun; our system allows for that range. We can turn up or down the expressiveness of the brand based upon the situation or conversation.

The work...

...is ripped. Torn. Bold. Digital. Layered. And courageous. It has energy and motion.

Tears are used to reveal information or to focus on something.

Layers and textures represent the constant stream of overlapping and intersecting conversation.

The use of color that POPS conveys humor, intensity, and authenticity.

And we ground everything in our iconic logo, Twitter blue, AND Tweets.

Because words matter.

We worked with @grillitype in Switzerland to develop Chirp, our first-ever proprietary typeface. Chirp strikes the balance between messy and sharp to amplify the fun and irreverence of a Tweet, but can also carry the weight of seriousness when needed.

To get there we blended American Gothic and European Grotesque styles, adding specific handmade quirks of early woodcut specimens. This gives us a versatile and contemporary family with international sensibilities. We’re in the process of extending Chirp to languages beyond the Latin alphabet.

Finally, the core of our product isn’t changing, we’re just changing how we show up.

We feel this work is the truest form and reflection of who we are as a company and what our service represents. We are being Twitter.

Twitter is what's happening and what people are talking about right now.

The team

• Derrit DeRouen, Creative Director, Global Brand
• Hideki Nick Watanabe, Global Brand Director
• Meg Dudley, Lead Brand Strategist, Global Brand
• Devon Harris, Global Brand Manager
• Kyra Ivanoff, Lead Program Manager
• Maggie Kishibe, Sr. Research Manager, MI&A

+160 other awesome Tweeps

Thanks for coming along with us,
Donna Lamar, Global ECD, Twitter

-"Imperfect, by design"

[extratone]

"STRATEGIC IGNORANCE"

"Strategic Knowledge"

---

Photo by Franck on Unsplash

By Ireti Akinrinade and Joan Mukogosi, Research Assistants, Data & Society

In Unseen Teen: The Challenges of Building Healthy Tech for Young People, researchers at Data & Society asked tech workers how they consider or design for the health and well-being of the people who use their platforms, particularly adolescents. One tech worker explained: “Obviously we do have teen users, we assume, but we don’t collect age data about people. Just like we don’t collect really any personal data about people so we don’t have any basis to know who is a minor and who is not.” The report calls this abdication of responsibility “strategic ignorance,” and the research suggests that by carefully choosing what they _don’t _know about their users, tech companies fail to protect the health and well-being of adolescents on their platforms.

Despite the prevalence of strategic ignorance inside social media and gaming companies, today’s teen tech users have developed a number of creative and often hilarious strategies to make sure that they are seen, heard, and valued online.

Photo by Shingi Rice on Unsplash

While companies feign ignorance about marginalized users on their sites, these savvy users flip the script, developing strategic knowledge about the platforms they frequent. Strategic knowledge is an imaginative praxis that uses deliberate engagement tactics to feed algorithms, in order to specify which content should grace a users’ feed. As a foil to strategic ignorance, strategic knowledge is an affirmation that human recipients of algorithmic decisions can wrest power from humans behind the code.

Some platforms view themselves as a digital commons, and are therefore hesitant to heavily-moderated content. Conversely, gaming sites devoted to building worlds, or platforms like TikTok–an app which publicly self-identifies as a place “to inspire creativity and bring joy”–may be more willing than other companies to suppress user-generated content that doesn’t match the company’s sense of self.

Strategic knowledge is an imaginative praxis that uses deliberate engagement tactics to feed algorithms, in order to specify which content should grace a users’ feed.

These corporate identities are operationalized through the platforms’ algorithms, and on TikTok, coding for “joy” has resulted in a discriminatory algorithm that further suppresses marginalized users. TikTok users have speculated about coded discrimination on the platform, sharing individual experiences and anecdotal evidence to identify and disrupt the algorithm. Engaging in collective guesswork, these users take to the comments section to propose different theories about why the algorithm acts in discriminatory ways.

In a recent video, @jameslxke asks his followers why TikTok’s algorithm puts trans users in harm’s way by promoting their content on conservative For You pages. If the algorithm is smart enough to know each user’s identity and is intent on keeping users on its platform, @jameslxke reasons, then why does it put vulnerable users at risk for what he calls a “digital lynching”? In the comment section of @jameslxke’s video, users speculate that creating conflict serves the platform’s bottom line: “tiktok does it on purpose bc arguing/dialogue keeps people on the app & the shock value of sending videos to ppl who wont enjoy it boost their app.” By sharing experiences, asking questions, and crowdsourcing answers, teens are developing an algorithmic folklore while discerning the potential motivations behind TikTok’s software engineering.

Other TikTok users create multiple accounts to segment their different interests, or to exert control over what content the algorithm recommends to them and how their content should be recommended to others. Through selective interaction with particular types of content, users can reach different niches ranging from “garden-tok” to “academic-tok.” One teen user, @izaiahisaac, made a video describing how he curated a separate “spam account” which enables him to access a conservative TikTok feed. On this burner account, @izaiahisaac noticed a trend where users who have tested positive for COVID-19 deliberately enter public spaces with the intent to infect others. By sharing this content with his followers on his main account, Izaiah individually intervened in breaking the silo that TikTok’s algorithm builds between users with different political views or offline identities. Rather than waiting for conservative content to trickle from one end of TikTok’s political spectrum to his own, Izaiah used the platform’s coded categorization of identity markers to inform his followers about right-wing tactics without exposing himself to harm.

Illustration by Cathryn Virginia for Data & Society’s [Unseen Teen](https://datasociety.net/library/the-unseen-teen/) report

While scholarship on TikTok remains in its early stages, journalists and experts have investigated the experiences of teens on the app. In a 2020 Twitter thread, Marc Faddoul, an AI researcher at UC Berkeley School of Information, conducted an experiment demonstrating that TikTok’s recommendation algorithm tended to suggest accounts with profile pictures that matched the same race, age, or facial characteristics as the ones he already followed. His theory about TikTok’s “physiognomic bubbles” (which bear a relationship to a painful history of eugenicist classifications, and thus may well imply racial bias) was bolstered when internal documents were reported to reveal that the platform directed global content moderators to suppress posts by people with certain facial characteristics. Reporters at the Intercept who reviewed the documents note that “although what it takes to earn a spot on the ‘For You’ page remains a mystery, the document reveals that it takes very little to be excluded, all based on the argument that uploads by unattractive, poor, or otherwise undesirable users could ‘decrease the short-term new user retention rate.’”

The incentive to retain users by hyper-personalizing feeds illuminates an important contradiction inherent in strategic ignorance: though in many cases, these companies collect enough personalized data to target ads and videos to specific identities and demographic groups, that data often fails to cross over to their user experience and product development teams. This siloing of information and lack of corporate will to intervene in teen well-being contributes to a glaring gap in strategic knowledge: questions that explicitly critique the people behind the algorithm are absent from this collective guesswork. While teenagers debate the algorithmic incentives coded into their user experience, it seems that TikTok’s corporate black box remains intact.

Young users may not realize just how integral human actions are in algorithmic outcomes, and corporate strategic ignorance only serves to deepen that gap.

This gap in strategic knowledge may be a product of limited time and energy: reverse-engineering TikTok’s algorithm through the assembling of folk knowledge is a daunting task. Young users may not realize just how integral human actions are in algorithmic outcomes, and corporate strategic ignorance only serves to deepen that gap. Gaining insight into the human decisions and corporate mechanisms behind the app will help teenagers refute the notion that algorithms are purely artificial and that digital infrastructure is unmovable. Digital agency, borne out of deeper connections between young people and the people who build the platforms where they spend meaningful time, is a valuable tool for teenagers seeking to shape their digital worlds.

While TikTok has responded to calls for transparency about their black box algorithmic practices by releasing information about how their “‘For You’ Page” algorithm works, teenage users are still fighting to understand how to use the app safely, effectively, and expressively. Whether it be through not collecting data, collecting too much content, or through unclear lines of responsibility for knowledge, attempts to obscure the platform’s inner workings are being subverted by teenagers across cyberspace every single day. Strategic knowledge offers proof that teenagers are refusing to be forgotten by the people who build the platforms they love. By molding platforms that seek to ignore them into spaces for growth, connection, education, and joy, teenagers are sending a signal to tech workers that their experiences matter.

-"Strategic Knowledge"

[extratone]

"How MarQuis Trill Gained Millions Of Followers And What He Can Teach You About Millennial Marketing" Aug 3, 2021 at 00:55

---

|Oct 5, 2019,|1,865,077 views1,865,077 views

Social influencer, investor, and entrepreneur [+] Entertainment 258 Agency Inc

More From Forbes

The U.S. Census Bureau predicts that millennials are projected to outnumber Baby Boomers as the largest living adult generation in America. With the millennial generation making up such a huge portion of American consumers, it is imperative that companies understand how to effectively market products and services to this group. For this generation, social media has become an integral part of their lives. Many companies have taken notice and are using social media to craft their marketing strategies, however, many organizations struggle to understand and determine how to successfully capture the attention of millennial consumers. One person that companies can learn a lot from is MarQuis Trill, a social media influencer, investor, and entrepreneur who has figured out how to authentically gain and capture the attention of young audiences. MarQuis made his social media debut on Myspace in 2003, at the tender age of 12. In 2017, he was listed as one of the most influential people on the internet. Now, through his social media platforms, MarQuis reaches millions of people every month, with a large percentage of his audience being millennials and Generation Z. After deciphering the formula for success, MarQuis started an agency called Entertainment 258, which is focused on helping businesses, influencers, athletes and artists develop and expand their brands. What are companies getting wrong when it comes to millennial marketing strategies? How does MarQuis keep his audience engaged? What are some best practices when it comes to millennial marketing on social media? MarQuis sat down with Forbes to discuss these questions and more.

Janice Gassam: Who is MarQuis Trill? How did you develop such a huge following on social media?

---

MarQuis Trill: It basically developed in college. I went to Prairie View A&M University on a full-ride scholarship. I had a chance to go to other big schools like Baylor, Texas A&M, USC…but I decided to go to an HBCU, just to change the culture…once I started attending the school, I saw the culture of the community. I went from playing basketball to [be] an artist, to [be] a promoter online and it just grew from there. I always had that marketing strategy inside me and my school kind of just brought that out of me.

---

Gassam: What are some mistakes that companies make when it comes to branding and marketing to millennials?

---

Trill: I think companies are getting things wrong, first, inside the company itself. They’re hiring people that are not a part of the culture—that’s the first thing. Everything we see on TV is a copy. We’ve seen multiple videos, multiple commercials from our favorite influencers. The people that work in those places are copying exactly what the millennials are doing, instead of coming to us and collaborating with us and actually hiring us and giving us jobs…instead of paying an influencer, how about hiring an influencer? It should start inside.

Second…I call it ‘camouflage marketing.’ And what camouflage marketing is, is when you’re marketing something, but it’s not focused on the actual brand. So that could be merchandise, that could be accessories, that could be sponsorships, that could be a flash of your logo…I think they should focus more on that, and creating cool content…collaborations, collaborations, collaborations. As time goes on, a 13-year-old turns 21…you always have to change…you always have to connect with the millennials and with the new generation. If you don’t do that, you’re going to be disconnected. Once you become disconnected, it doesn’t matter if you’re a million-dollar company or a billion-dollar company—you’re going to lose revenue dollars…that’s what I feel a lot of companies are missing. You don’t necessarily have to hire someone, like a kid, to be the CMO of your entire company, just a collaboration or maybe you can give them a smaller job where they are just over marketing strategies for Instagram…all you need is five millennials in the office space for Twitter and Instagram and you’re going to have a hundred thousand followers, a million followers and they’re going to run it all for you…they don’t need big budgets because they’re young kids and as time goes on and they start doing more for your company, you’ll be able to pay them anyway.

---

Gassam: What are some trends you anticipate on social media when it comes to millennial marketing?

---

Trill: Well…it’s always something new and something fresh…what I try to focus on is fast news and fast content. That’s where you’ll get most of the engagement and most of your following from. That’s how I grew my following originally. I was taking videos from YouTube and putting them on Twitter. I was taking videos from Facebook and putting them on Twitter because different platforms have different videos and different followings. Something that’s been posted on YouTube probably hasn’t been seen by the people on Twitter…Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, they don’t all have the same following. Different people get on different platforms because they like the functionalities of that platform. Kids that are on TikTok might not necessarily be on Twitter. People that are on Snapchat might not necessarily use Instagram all the time. That’s what people fail to realize. Every single influencer, they may not have every single social media platform. That’s where a lot of people miss out on…Twitter is for news information and text. Instagram is for pictures. Snapchat is for, right there on-the-spot videos. Basically, live videos…TikTok, [for] six seconds dancing. You have to be creative…young kids are on [TikTok] all the way from eight years old all the way up to 21.

---

Gassam: So, companies need to learn that they can’t post the same social media content on every single platform and expect it to stick?

---

Trill: Exactly. They also have to use camouflage marketing. Using influencers, creating dope content that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with their products. They can flash the product in between the content or at the end or the person that’s inside the content can actually say the product. It can be a one-minute music video and five seconds out of the music video, that artist is pouring cheerios…he’s not necessarily saying ‘I eat cheerios.’ Now the consumer and the person that is watching the content, they’re smarter now…they know what’s fake, they know what’s an ad now…with the rules and everything you even have to put ‘ad’ or ‘promo’. So now, when you put that, your engagement goes down even more…you have to do it in a camouflage sense.

---

Gassam: Is there a social media platform you would recommend companies use when marketing to millennials?

---

Trill: It depends on what their product or service is. If you’re selling merch, I would definitely say go with Instagram and YouTube. If you’re already a super known company, I would say go with Twitter because the engagement there reaches faster…you get more retweets, you get more favorites, more impressions. If you’re trying to sell anything, if you’re trying to become a brand yourself, if you’re trying to conquer a market, I would say use YouTube because Google owns YouTube and they create all [the] SEO that’s on the internet…when you search something like ‘how to dance,’ whoever made a video on ‘how to dance’ on YouTube, that’s what’s going to pop up for a search and that’s free marketing, free viewership for the person, influencers or brand that made that video. Now content is becoming the search. That goes for marketing and branding as well.

---

Gassam: How can companies stand out to millennials on social media?

---

Trill: They should be more direct with the consumer. The consumer is getting smarter because they’ve seen so much content, so they can tell if something is fake, something is real, something is being promoted and they won’t engage as much to it. If the consumer and the people that are selling products, if they intertwine and they come more direct with people that are in the communities…then that’s when you start getting more product sales and more distribution in your product. I wouldn’t buy anything that I’m not tapped into or that I didn’t see anyone else wearing. iPhone is hot because everyone has an iPhone, not because it’s the best phone…they keep developing different products. They have apps, they have iTunes, they have podcasts…they’re tapped into every culture…they’re basically competing against themselves…subscription-based is what’s coming next. AR is coming next, virtual reality is coming next. And these are the things that these companies need to focus on…someone will always develop something new; someone will always come up with something that’s greater than the other platforms.****

---

Gassam: Popeyes recently came out with a very successful marketing campaign for their new chicken sandwich. Should companies copy these campaigns in order to be successful? In regard to the millennial consumer, do you think controversy sells?

---

Trill: I wouldn’t say copy. But they should come up with their own strategy. Once you see something so much, you are making the consumer smarter. Your next marketing campaign is going to have to be harder.

I think controversy is always great…but if you’re deliberately doing things on purpose and expecting a great outcome, nine times out of ten, it might not go your way. But if you have a whole marketing strategy behind it and if you know exactly what you’re doing and where you’re trying to go, then it’s definitely going to work…we don’t have to pay for press.

This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

To learn more about MarQuis, visit his website or connect with him on Instagram.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website or some of my other work here.

I am the author of the best-selling books Dirty Diversity and The Pink Elephant. I founded an award-winning consultancy, BWG Business Solutions, which was created to

…Read More

Jul 1, 2021,10:43am EDT|37,100 views

Banks Have Made Climate Pledges—Now We Need Climate Action

By Augustin de Kerversau, Head of Corporate and Commercial Banking, Executive Vice President

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world," the Persian poet Rumi wrote. “Today I am wise, so I am changing myself." The banking industry would be wise to change, too, and quickly.

In April, 43 global banks, including Bank of the West's parent company BNP Paribas, joined the industry-led and UN-convened Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), committing their investment and lending portfolios will reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

Bank of the West took action years ago to ensure what it does and doesn't finance both support the planet's health.

Bank of the West

The NZBA is important to meeting the Paris Agreement's objectives by mobilizing the entire financial system to address the menace of climate change. Yet, not all of the major US banks, some of whom are the largest funders of fossil fuels, joined this global effort to reduce and track emissions.

We can't solve the climate crisis without banks.

Even if greenhouse gas emissions stopped today, lingering carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would keep global temperatures from cooling anytime soon, according to the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society. This raises the urgency for banks—including those making pledges to protect the planet—to take more substantive steps regarding their portfolios. Research from the nonprofit CDP finds that emissions attributed to banks' investing and lending activities are 700 times larger than emissions from banks themselves.

Bank of the West took action years ago to ensure what it does and doesn't finance both support the planet's health. We don't have all the answers, and we know there is more work ahead, but the lessons we've learned along the way may be helpful for others in our industry to change.

We Must Close the Climate Financing Gap

Financing targeting the climate crisis grew in 2018 to $546 billion, with the private sector providing the majority at $323 billion, according to the Climate Policy Initiative.

However, the UN says up to $3.8 trillion is needed annually through 2050 to prevent an irreversible rise in global warming. We need to close this financing gap and soon.

Private-sector banks have an important role. In fact, banks doubled their share of climate finance between 2013 and 2018. Based on financing data from the first few months of 2021, banks appear to be on track to lend more this year to renewable energy projects than to fossil fuel projects, according to an analysis by Bloomberg.

bank of the west

Motivations Matter

Bank of the West in 2017 implemented policies that restrict or prohibit financing of certain environmentally harmful activities, such as fracking and Arctic drilling. And in 2018, the bank committed $1 billion over five years to finance a renewable energy transition. Our policies are publicly available, and we are well on our way to meeting our financing goal.

As part of BNP Paribas, we were motivated to act because we believe the private sector has a global responsibility to proactively address the climate crisis. We were driven by purpose.

Global Finance Can Be a Game Changer

A planetary crisis affects us all. With that in mind, Bank of the West has used its global reach for the betterment of our customers and the planet. For example, we're providing working capital to the US subsidiaries of major European energy companies, supporting the growth of renewable energy generation across North America.

This is part of our three-pronged strategy focusing on the development of renewables, cleantech, and sustainable finance across industries.

We're also using our balance sheet to encourage corporate borrowers to meet more ambitious social and environmental goals. Building on the industry-leading expertise of BNP Paribas, Bank of the West launched its Sustainability Linked Loans offer in April.

What Banks Don't Finance Makes a Difference

What banks stand for and what they finance are critical. So is what they decide not to finance. Our low-carbon future depends in part on banks not making the climate crisis worse by underwriting carbon-intensive industries.

We know restricting financing based on principles is not easy because we have been on this path for a while. And we stand with the 43 global members of the UN's NZBA because we firmly believe it's necessary for the planet.

I'm humbled by the immensity of the task before us to stop the climate crisis. I also believe our global industry, collectively, can make a significant difference.

Bank of the West is a fundamentally different kind of bank: We have the strongest environmental stance of any major bank; we lead with diversity; and we have global…Read More

-"How MarQuis Trill Gained Millions Of Followers And What He Can Teach You About Millennial Marketing"

[extratone]

PTCruiserUSA