Video killed the radio star

[liv]

It's almost a ritual complaint by now, that "nobody" posts to LJ any more, they've all gone to Facebook. I don't think this is entirely true, or at least it's only a very small aspect of the problem. TBH, LJ had a good run; 12 years is absolutely ancient in internet terms! It's only to be expected that something else would be the cool thing by now, and even FB itself is kind of falling out of fashion, the real cutting edge isn't there any more. The question is, why hasn't LJ been replaced with something as much better than LJ as LJ was better than MySpace?

My theory is partly that FB itself has killed the web as I knew it from the early 2000s. The fact that FB is the market leader means that innovations aren't happening in the directions I would like to see, because everybody is trying to be cargo-cult Facebook. But what's really killed the kind of sites that people use to build communities and have good conversations is that we've lost the war on spam. In much the same sense that we've lost the war on terror: the protections we're relying on to keep out the spam are basically worse than the spam onslaught itself. Using the web to create new stuff, letting users take sites in the direction that suits our purposes, is increasingly impossible these days, because any freedom that site users have can (at least potentially) be exploited by spammers.

That is to say, one of the reasons FB became popular in the early days was precisely because people who weren't terribly internet-savvy could be sure that all the posts and comments they'd see came from their actual friends, not Nigerian scammers or people trying to sell them grey market pharmaceuticals. But unfortunately, what we now have is something much more sinister: a horrible arms race with everyone from the marketing departments of large, legitimate companies to the dodgiest of bottom-feeding spammers using all kinds of dirty tricks to get a piece of the trust network that FB's walled garden represents, to give the impression that your friends endorse their products. Everything from posting funny memes which get loads of shares and likes, and then selling the page to the highest bidder, to hiding "Like" buttons so that people click them accidentally, to outright lying that someone's FB friends use or endorse your product or service or social game when they have never had anything to do with it.

At the same time, a side-effect of trying to protect people from the "Cheap V1agra!!!!" obvious and extremely annoying spam, the post-FB web is increasingly forbidding the kind of actions that actually promote community. More and more sites forbid commenting altogether, or only allow comments from users who jump through a ridiculous number of hoops and pretty much tell the commenting system their home address, annual income and mother's maiden name. Or else they let FB handle the commenting, which is certainly one way to outsource the spam prevention problem. But it also contributes to FB's strangehold over the web, and largely eliminates the kind of stable pseudonym based interactions that were the core of LJ and Web 2.0's golden years. I sincerely believe that the best conversations happen where everybody can choose a pseudonym which is then attached to a profile and history. You get much more diversity than if everybody has to use a name that points to their offline identity, including their professional life and their cultural / ethnic / class etc background. Using FB to combat spam is making that harder and harder all the time. (And Google+ had this misfeature built in from the start: their bizarre insistence on names that fit their anglocentric pattern was supposed to ensure users would be able to interact with "real" people and not spambots.)

Another problem is that spammers and Facebook, along with the other social sites that are trying to make FB-levels of big money, have essentially killed the mainstay of the web as originally conceived by Berners-Lee: the URL. You can't post your own HTML on most websites these days, because that gives a loophole that spammers can use to attempt to increase their Google rank. This means that when people want to share interesting content, they end up being forced to click a button that automagically makes a "preview" of the site they're linking to, but the actual URL is hidden or removed altogether. So readers quickly lose sight of where the content originated from, and there's a whole new ecosystem of trying to get more shares. Tumblr is the worst for this, because it's entirely built on the assumption that people repost content at will without any traceable connection to who originated it. But FB isn't a whole lot better, you're very often seeing reshares of reshares of reshares, and it's easy enough for bad actors to insert themselves into the chain and make it look like the latest funny came from a dodgy site. The communities built up around people linking to interesting content, like the communities built up around people having interesting conversations with friends-of-friends or even strangers, are atrophying in this situation. Remember the controversy when LJ introduced those horrible Snap preview things by default? Now the equivalent is everywhere and sites that don't have them look old-fashioned.

The lack of user control over what they post has had another side-effect which I hate: the creeping replacement of actual text with pictures of text or even worse, videos with absolutely no visual content, just a person holding up signs with words on. This I think is partly caused by Twitter, because an uploaded image of a joke or a political rant or whatever fits into the character limit, and is still less hassle than finding and setting up an actual blog on one of the rapidly dying sites that still allow long-form posting. But I think it's a more general effect of the post-FB culture, where everything is trying to be eye-catching, competing for attention with professional designers, yet ordinary web users who are truly creative are really cramped in what they can do because of the anti-spam limitations. I hate pictures and videos of text, because they're high bandwidth for me to actually be able to see them, and they don't have any of the advantages of being searchable, archivable etc. Plus audio or video is a much, much slower way for me to absorb information than reading. Also, pictures of essentially textual information are themselves essentially a way of evading anti-spam measures.

The combination of the web trying to move away from URLs, and the evolutionary pressure to display information as pictures, is one of the things that's basically breaking sensible search, I think. Even the giants like Google are forced to rely on easily gameable metrics like how often stuff gets shared, because the original basis of the Googlerank, how many reputable sites link to a particular document, is not meaningful any more. As a result, search is hopelessly polluted, and the very mechanisms that were supposed to keep spammy black-hat SEO out of the top ranked results are instead contributing to spam and making it harder for both search engines and humans to detect.

This started out as a response to Anil Dash's more measured and more technically knowledgeable article on the web we lost. (Dash was one of the real pioneers of blogging culture, by the way.) I think the problem with the Facebookification of everything goes deeper than what he talks about. It's a problem that most of the people I want to talk to are on FB, and FB as everybody knows has terrible privacy policies and exists to serve its advertisers, not its users. But that's not the whole story. The dominance of Facebook and its model, along with solutions worse than the problem to spam, is making the whole rest of the web worse. It's making it so much harder to meet interesting new people online, and without that, well, communities around existing networks fragment and become dormant, to the point that nobody really posts to LJ any more except to complain that nobody posts to LJ any more.

Obviously, I would like it if Dreamwidth were the answer to this problem. That is in fact why I continue to post actively here even as more and more people are drifting away. But pessimistically, I fear that DW will always be too small to compete with all the sites that are optimizing for getting huge numbers of users, rather than for being actually useful to have conversations.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

I think I see what you're getting at. We almost need a way to get those who still want to talk to talk to each other.

[liv]

I agree, it would be good to get more people talking to eachother. I keep trying, but I'm increasingly getting the feeling that I'm working against the direction the internet as a whole is heading, rather than following it, and that makes me pessimistic.

[angelofthenorth]

It's against the way society is going. Facebook has encouraged hanging onto the ghosts of the past, rather than going out and meeting random new people, which is what LJ did. Society is doing something similar - how many people do you know in your street, and how much is that different from 25 years ago?

[liv]

It's hard to tell if you're right. For me, one of the things I do like about FB is that it keeps me in touch with people I knew at different stages of my life. I don't see that as hanging on to ghosts; for me, part of the point of meeting new people is so that we can share the experiences that continue throughout our lives.

25 years ago... I wasn't even ten, the ways I met new people at that age were totally different from how adults meet new people. I wasn't really very aware of the general state of society. The internet didn't yet exist in any recognizable form.

I knew some of my neighbours, but I think that's partly because I lived in an area that was mostly young families, there were a lot of kids my age. Now I know fewer, but that's partly because this street and the surrounding ones are mostly people who work for the hospital on short contracts, junior doctors and agency nurses and such; they're not here long enough for the neighbourhood to be a community, and many of them work weird hours. Half a mile from here is a thousand-year-old village that got swallowed by the city, and people there seem to know their neighbours a lot better than my family ever did when we were kids. There's too much variation between places for me to glean much from anecdotal observations.

I'm wary of declaring that society is going to the dogs! "Society" is just too many different things and different groups of people.

[elf]

But what's really killed the kind of sites that people use to build communities and have good conversations is that we've lost the war on spam.

This needs to be bolded, blinking, and stapled to the foreheads of senators who want to "make the internet safer and more profitable."

Use the anti-spam laws we have--we do have some--to actually prosecute fraudulent mass-emailings; go after commenters who post ad links instead of real comments (against most site TOS); bring up the concept of extradition and international prosecution for spamfarms that make money by clogging up the internet. 90% of email is spam... which costs real, verifiable money.

I hate pictures and videos of text

Me too. I expect I'll eventually get a Tumblr, because that's where the porn is so much interesting content is there, but I'm not looking forward to the picture-heavy bandwidth-sucking discourse.

I agree that DW is likely to remain too small to be The New Place for serious discourse. I hope it continues to thrive; I love this platform, and DW is the only LJ-code place that's working on improvements for the users. (LJ, in their frantic bid to become Facebook With Blogging, are going to watch their userbase dwindle until they're nothing but a support system for ONTD and a couple of other communities. Dominating the Russian blogosphere is only going to be useful until the readers get annoyed at the layout and go somewhere else.)

I expect that serious discourse will remain a minority interest. The internet was founded by people who love it... but the general public is not interested in 500-2000 word essays about Meaningful Topics, most of the time. (And that's not an insult. I love me some lolcats too; I don't always have time for Serious Essays.)

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.
Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

This is not a bad thing... we just need to make space for the research papers to continue.

[liv]

Interesting thoughts, thank you. It may be that spam has pretty much already killed email. I mean, people still use email, but it's seeming increasingly a relic of the late twentieth century. It's really hard work, for example, to get our students to read their emails, they don't see why we can't just get hold of them by text message, or walled garden messaging systems that are convenient for smartphones, like Facebook messaging, BBM, whatever the iPhone mixed synchronous / asynchronous communication thingy is called, the name escapes me just now.

The interesting thing about Tumblr is that for all its faults, people don't seem to post pictures of text there the way they do on FB and Twitter. I may be a curmudgeon, but I don't hate pictures and videos in general! I just hate using these high bandwidth, non-accessible, non-searchable formats for posting information that is essentially textual. My experience of Tumblr is that most often people simply don't post text at all, as you say, everything is visual. But I've definitely seen decent length essays posted and shared there, and they're posted as plain text when they do show up. For me the big problem with Tumblr is not that there are too many pictures, but that there are no comments, and the culture of reblogging without meaningful attribution.

I wonder if part of the problem is that we're increasingly heading for a two-tier web. People who have smartphones and unlimited data plans get all the shiny, but they also get all the advertising because it makes sense for advertisers to target the people with money! These days advertising includes massive amounts of tracking; smartphones themselves do far too much broadcasting location and activity to the world, and there's loads of incentives out there to just let them do that, not least Google's blatant data-grab of a "game", Ingress. Meanwhile, people who have access to shared desktop computers at best and have to budget carefully for bandwidth are increasingly shut out, and there aren't many alternatives because the profitable sites are becoming so dominant.

[ursamajor]

I wonder if part of the problem is that we're increasingly heading for a two-tier web. People who have smartphones and unlimited data plans get all the shiny, but they also get all the advertising because it makes sense for advertisers to target the people with money! Meanwhile, people who have access to shared desktop computers at best and have to budget carefully for bandwidth are increasingly shut out, and there aren't many alternatives because the profitable sites are becoming so dominant.

Ayup. Which is why even though I understand the financial sense of the paid-only model, I worry about it, too. Between that and the "free-but-ad-supported" walled gardens, we're talking a fair bit of internet "ghettoization" already in progress.

Thanks for a lovely, thoughtful post. Much to chew on.

[liv]

I think the Pinterest guy has a very good point, that building our web infrastructure on services that have no business model is not very clever. I'm not talking about global scale inequalities here, but, say, within rich countries, there's got to be plenty of people who can afford to drop a few tens of dollars a year on subscription sites, but still can't afford a smartphone with a data plan and a modern computer and a broadband subscription. Mind you, I don't see how paid-only is plausible for social; even rich people aren't going to pay to join sites if they have to make a commitment up front without getting a chance to experience what's good about the site.

What's worrying me is that there's so little room for innovation even in possible business models! Everything's being squeezed by Facebook and Google, if someone comes up with a way of funding their site that's fair and honest it's hard to see how it can get off the ground. What I'm hoping for is innovations in interoperability, but so far it's proved hard to separate that from creepiness.

[jack]

I think any new major social networking tool may have to provide a benefit to people primarily using facebook/twitter to start with, in order to acquire any use at all, but that doesn't seem impossible. (There are other impediments too!)

[liv]

I really do hope DW does in fact do well, because it's pretty much everything I want in a blogging / social networking platform. Except for the crucial ingredient of having a big userbase, and specifically, being attractive enough that the people I want to talk to are here.

It's also not all that easy for people who don't already have accounts to leave comments, and that's a killer feature. I remember when LJ sucked all my friends in, because they started out leaving low-friction, "anonymous" (as in not logged in, they always told me who they were), comments, and eventually decided they were doing so often enough that it was worth making an account of their own. But spam means that most DW journals have anon commenting turned off, or depend on OpenID which is really buggy and awkward, or make people fill in stupid CAPTCHAs which can be a big enough barrier that a lot of people simply won't bother. So it's hard to attract new users.

I actually had a different read of that classic Zuckerman article. Pictures of cute cats are surprisingly important, because if people can subvert a website for cat pictures, they can also subvert it for political activism. Nobody intentionally makes a website for the purposes of lolcats (or whatever the next iteration of cool internet memes is going to be), but when users can take stuff in the direction they feel like, you get new emergent stuff. The whole article, looks sadly dated now, and that's part of what I'm complaining about: nowadays, lots of websites are so locked down that you can only use them for what the creators intended, which usually involves providing lots of profitable data for advertisers. I don't think trivial versus serious is quite the issue, it's predictable, streamlined usage versus creative usage.

Physicists are still sharing research papers quite happily! But I'm not seeing anything as original as lolcats were when they first started appearing. It seems strange to be nostalgic for that, but they were really quite a new and clever thing once.

[ceb]

The thing I hate is the way that everything is now set up for the sharing of shallow trivialities - twitter witticisms or funny cat pictures or 'pokes'. FB, twitter, et al. just don't have the user interface you need to write an essay or have a proper conversation or create something large. Sure, you can keep a blog or a web page, but everyone who wants to do this has to go out and find their own audience from scratch.

[liv]

There was a great essay I read about why shallow trivial things always end up doing better, especially when we're talking "shares," than serious essays. Ironically I can't find it again because all the relevant search terms lead to people trying to sell me social bookmarking related SEO *sigh* Basically, the number of people who are going to see something funny or eyecatching and click "share" or "reblog" or "upvote" or whatever is always going to be hugely, hugely greater than the number of people who have time to read and digest a serious essay and be impressed enough to pass it on.

This is another reason why, IMO, the loss of old-fashioned hyperlinks matters, because when Google could rank things based on numbers of links from sites which themselves had lots of incoming links, that got the most interesting and useful stuff to float to the top. But now that stuff can really only be ranked by how many people share it, the trivial shallow stuff is inevitably going to float to the top (apart from the commercial crap that comes from people spending money and effort to deliberately game social bookmarking).

And you're quite right that you need not just a platform for posting essays and conversations, you need one that comes with a built-in community. Or at least make it low-friction for casual visitors to join in the conversation, if everybody has to sign up for yet another site in order to exclude the spammers, nobody will bother.

[iddewes]

This is interesting, and a lot of stuff I wasn't particularly aware of, as I am not technical at all really. I have a community on LJ, people on my list there mostly post pretty regularly, but not the kind of posts that you make - generally diary type stuff about their lives, which is what I mostly end up posting as well. As someone who has been penpalling for most of my life, my LJ ends up like an electronic penpal letter most of the time, and some of my actual penpals are on there as well, especially the German ones. When I have occasionally written something about current issues in the past I have not had much response. So perhaps it is mostly the penpallers who are still doing LJ - even if they are not my own penpals nearly everyone on my flist there is a fellow penpaller - and we have always been a minority.
Also what you have said has made me think a lot about the pictures that are shared on facebook - I had not really thought much before about where some of them originate. I do have some friends there at least who do link to interesting articles as well, however.

[liv]

Thank you! The electronic penpal concept is a really good one, I think. To a great extent, that was how I started out using LJ. It was a way to keep in touch with more people than I could reasonably correspond with, and to meet new people with whom I had a correspondence-based relationship. I've found it works well to mix up personal diary type stuff with more essay type posts, but I think that depends a lot on your social circle.

[jack]

OK, I just set up cross-posting from LJ to twitter. I'll see how that works.

I've also been reminded of the existence of my IRL filter, where I can post about personal things with less of a feel that I'm playing to a huge audience. I was never able to maintain one before, but I decided it didn't matter if it was exact about people I sort-of know being on it, so long as it had the people I know best, and didn't have the people I know least.

[liv]

*hug* I've never been big on filters. But then I don't really feel shy in front of audiences; the only reason I lock stuff at all is to protect other people's privacy. But I think the existence of filters is a big part of why LJ did so well at one point, giving people the security that they could know exactly who was reading, which encouraged people to have a presence there and some of them would mix in public stuff as well.

[jack]

I didn't think I'd need filters, but I found that I was increasingly posting less and less personal stuff because I wasn't comfortable throwing it out to everyone. Not that I minded them knowing, per se, but the more people, the more I feel obliged to explain a lot of background, and the more I expect random pedantry to overtake empathy.

If I'm saying "I felt emotional at work" or "I went on a date" or "Agh, dealing with extended family is complicated", I can say it to anyone, but it becomes more of an essay, whereas to a restricted filter, it's more of a soap opera, which is actually what's engaging to people most of the time.

In fact, I compromised by setting up an IRL filer but only half-arsedly doing the job of winnowing people out of it. But by filtering it AT ALL I seemed to get the psychological benefit :)

[lethargic_man]

Insightful, and depressing. But perhaps a ray of light in the title: Video didn't kill radio. To be sure, it shrunk and had to adapt; but the two do coexist alongside each other nowadays.

[liv]

I admit, I was feeling a bit down when I wrote this. I did quote the lyric in a spirit of slight self-parody, as in, I'm being nostalgic for an older form of technology, but the world marches on.

[catyak]

I discovered[*] this really cool thing called usenet. It is ideal for discussions, and there are applications out there for most common platforms that let you thread conversations and filter things in case spam turns up. It's text-based so no annoying adverts.

[*] OK, I discovered it back in 1993, but it's still going even now.

[liv]

Huh, Usenet. I've tried it a few times and never really settled there. In theory something that's purely text based, with threaded comments and filters and killfiles ought to be my online Utopia. In practice, my impression is that the topic-centred rather than person-centered style tends to encourage fanatics. People who overload every conversation with their weird hobby-horse or conspiracy theory, often involving bizarre racism, are much harder to filter out than outright spammers.

When you say there are applications for most common platforms, do you mean there is a program I can download and run under Windows and / or a browser add-on, or do you mean that if I run my own server I can install some modules that will work equally well with various database architectures? And where on Usenet would you recommend for good conversations?

[jack]

I think Dave means that there are clients for any platform: whatever the top hit on google for usenet client for windows is probably fine to download and use without being technical. Or you can just use google groups as an interface, so long as you don't commit the faux pas of assuming usenet is google groups.

But I don't know about content; I feel the same as you, that I like it in theory, but there's no communities I'm close to. (I think chiark has a usenet-based chiark-only blogging system.)

[catyak]

Thunderbird will do newsgroups, as will Outlook Express if you've still got that. I run my own server, mainly because it aggregates several different feeds for the local machines. (Note that I run Linux, so I'm less sure what's available for Windows.)

As for where, cam.misc is good for Cambridge-related stuff, uk.misc is full of the nutters you mention, and you can get a bit more specialist on pretty much any topic you want. I rarely post there, but uk.rec.sheds seems to have steady and sensible conversations. uk.singles did, but is mostly tumbleweed now. I think it has a lot of lurkers but from over 300 posts a day, it seems to have gone to one every 300 days.

D

[azurelunatic]

Spam, yeah. Spam is killing anonymous comments; this is why anonymous commenting is off by default on Dreamwidth.

I think OAuth and its ilk are the most exciting bit of tech for encouraging conversation with small cool sites; I like OAuth much better than Facebook Connect for pretty obvious reasons (mostly name, and the fact that it's Not Facebook, and thus not One Single Site).

My own strategy to deal with the twitter effect is to start linking the public and important stuff there (and link the locked stuff occasionally for the folks who read there but not other places, but who do have a key).

[liv]

OAuth feels like one of those things (like Diaspora*) that would be wonderful if it actually got off the ground. At the moment, most blogs let me comment with a Wordpress / Gravatar ID, or a Facebook ID (hell to the no!) and that's about it. Even OpenID is disappearing from sites that aren't DW. I don't think I've ever seen OAuth in the wild, except as a slightly less slimy form of the "give us your email passwrod.

The fact of having to turn anon commenting off, or make logged-out users jump through loads of hoops to comment here, is really really frustrating. It means there's a huge barrier to entry, and people who might in fact love DW if they stuck around just drift away before they even get a chance to engage. I know this is the fault of evil spammers, and not the fault of DW, but it still really annoys me. LJ grew exponentially in the early days precisely because it was easy for people who didn't have an account to comment on public posts, so guess what, after a while they did in fact create accounts. We can't do that these days, and it's infuriating.

[highlyeccentric]

For what it's worth, while my LJ friendslist is dying, my DW one is consistently growing and generating long-form conversations. Most of a highly personal kind, though - I get the feeling people are looking to other platforms for political debate.

[liv]

Actually, I personally am finding that DW works really well for giving me what I want. And I am meeting new people here, yourself included! So that's all happy and lovely and generally a very satisfactory substitute for LJ. But lots of my friends complain that LJ isn't like it used to be, and for one reason or another they don't want to move to DW, and, well. I don't want to be confined to one website, even a great website, I want the internet to include lots of examples of the kinds of interactions that I like, and it seems that for various reasons those are being driven out.

[kake]

I sincerely believe that the best conversations happen where everybody can choose a pseudonym which is then attached to a profile and history.

I think this is partly what Disqus is trying to do. I've found that I don't actually like Disqus "following me" around the web, though.

[liv]

Good point, thank you, I'd forgotten about Disqus. I think I was put off by technical issues rather than social ones last time I tried to interact with it. But as a method of outsourcing commenting tech, I would certainly rather have Disqus than FB. But it's true, I'm not totally enamoured of the idea of having all my comments on all sites linked to a single identity.

[kake]

You can have as many Disqus accounts as you have email addresses, and it's fairly easy to sign out from one and into another without having to leave the page you want to comment on. My main concern is that I don't want them building up a big list of the types of site I visit, and then using that to target ads at me later on.

[liv]

That definitely sounds like I should be giving Disqus another try, then, possibly with throwaway email addresses if I get paranoid.