Thoughts on structure, addiction and the Twitter acquisition
Enjoy having Elon Musk all up in your grill
People kept saying I should be on Twitter more. "It's more influential," people would tell me. "Nobody cares what you say on Facebook. It's better for your career."
I always found that funny, because you know who would always say that? People with fewer Twitter followers than I have Facebook followers.
That same crowd is at the core of the people upset by Twitter's acquisition by Musk.
I don’t think it’s great myself, don’t get me wrong; but after the 2016-2020 years, my standards for “things to get upset about” are somewhere near “an actual war happening”, and not as much about “another social network gets worse”.
I think that's because when you really get down to the core addictive appeal of Twitter, or Facebook for that matter, it ends up being uncomfortable to really get into. It's easier to adopt an overdetermined, hyperpartisan opinion than it is to inquest into the facts and talk to the people involved and see what's happening.
It comes down to what people are getting out of each one, which is a question of how each are engineered to addict people.
The addictive moment, when you really look at it, on Facebook, is the "react", the "like", and the "share", and to a lesser degree, the '"reply". We have unusually unique signals of approval and disapproval, and it is natural and intrinsically human to maximize approval and minimize social disapproval, even if it is somewhat manipulable and addictive behavior. Facebook is like a slot machine; we insert coins made of our attention and our personal content, and receive in exchange distraction and an intensely addictive sense of personal connection and social approval.
Twitter is more like a blackjack game writ large. On Twitter, the addictive moment is all about replies and maintaining your side of the conversation; it's less about casting Facebook posts out there into the ether to either go viral (about 0.01% - 0.05%, by my estimation) or get ignored, and more about direct engagement with people and brands.
The viral mechanism of Twitter is the mention, the "@" symbol that results in notifications to everyone in the chain of a conversation; I've had Tweets that were several hundred replies deep that were still, annoyingly, pinging me with notifications for replies like that. I've had replies go viral; indeed, a significant part of Twitter is viral replies more viral than the original 'stem' that they were responding to (e.g., people dunking on Charlie Kirk or Ted Cruz), I think.
For people who take their Twitter accounts, and thus their professional entities, the same way that video game players take their video game characters as avatars, as a vicariously-lived transposition of the self, this is immensely addictive. It's like a crowd full of hundreds of people... all saying your name.
Twitter was, in a lot of ways, what LinkedIn should have been; a space where people's statements, and replies, counted significantly as to their professional statuses. Indeed, even Facebook itself posts its corporate announcements to Twitter, rather than Facebook. It doesn't do that with LinkedIn. Twitter made significant institutions and brands and entities readily available to people, much more directly than people were used to, and it became a job for people, much more so than even people who literally post to Facebook and LinkedIn for a living.
So, I'm somewhat a discursive formalist, and somewhat of a functionalist; I'm someone who thinks that the patterns (hence, formalist) of statements (thus, discursive) and replies to each other is meaningful and does things for us (this part is why I’m a ‘functionalist’).
From my perspective, what I see up front is that Twitter is also, unfortunately, much more isotropic and 'flatter' than Facebook. It's isotropic in that everything is a tweet; there is no comment/post distinction, everything is a post. Facebook indicates replies to two levels, so reply to a comment is a separate entity than a comment; this can be seen in the URLs for comments and replies.
Consider the following:
On Twitter, there's only one level: replies. Every Tweet can have its own reply, even replies to other Tweets, so Twitter doesn't have "?comment_id" or "reply_comment_id" in its application programming interface - its API - that it offers up to the browser.
Thus, even though both @jonjimama and @carrybeyond are responding as part of the same conversation, they have two different URLs for their tweets. The segment at the end, &t=aoc0rtkwxRE8R2a6g5O6Xw, is only the indicator of the relationship.
If I enter a link to each tweet in this article, omitting that section at the end, in fact, you still get the relevant Tweet:
Now, compare this to Facebook’s structure. Here's the post by Elizabeth Warren:
https://www.facebook.com/senatorelizabethwarren/posts/544472743701261
Note the structure of that link - 'facebook.com' followed by 'senatorelizabethwarren' followed by 'post', followed by a lengthy number.
Now, here's a post URL where I share Elizabeth Warren's post.
https://www.facebook.com/choejoohn/posts/10166310556480603
Note that this has an entirely different URL - facebook.com, followed by my unique Facebook id, 'choejoohn', followed by 'posts', then the lengthy number. There isn’t any indicator that it’s a share of Elizabeth Warren’s post; I can, in fact, edit it altogether, remove Elizabeth Warren’s post, and add an image or a different external link its stead, and the permalink will stay the same (the number at the end, 10166310556480603, will not change).
So, here's a comment by John Godwin on my post:
https://www.facebook.com/choejoohn/posts/10166310556480603?comment_id=675266550220164
Note the structure at the end: it goes facebook.com, followed by my unique Facebook id, 'choejoohn', followed by 'posts', then the lengthy number, again... then it says
?comment_id=675266550220164
Now, here's a reply to that comment by Heather Park-Albertson:
https://www.facebook.com/choejoohn/posts/10166310556480603?comment_id=675266550220164&reply_comment_id=4963258433781474
At the end, unlike John Godwin's comment, at the end, it says
?comment_id=675266550220164&reply_comment_id=4963258433781474
That's as far as it goes. That is, you never get more than one "reply_comment_id" in a URL. Facebook simply isn't structured like that. So, if you reply to Heather Park-Albertson, or to John Godwin, there's no way of telling them apart; you can tag them, which would re-establish that relationship, but there's no formal distinction there past two levels.
Even though this attempts at least to distinguish a “stem” (an originating, replied-to statement) from a “reply”, it is a severe flattening of human speech patterns, it should be noted. A debate, as a constrained form of human speech focused on development of these “aboutness” structures, looks much different. Assume there are two sides in a debate, colored blue and red for convenience, and we are inspecting a map of the first three speeches, written top to bottom, with arrows linking what each individual statement is about:
We can go many more back-and-forth speeches, or columns; we’re stopping short at three to discuss the formal problems here. At the most abstract level, we can visualize the logical relationships here in simplistic sentential-logic terms.
When we try to discriminate between, say, multiple forms of the assertion ~(~r) we start to run into fairly unique problems, fairly rapidly. Debaters, historically, answer these questions in a more or less idiosyncratic fashion, usually without inspecting the answers too much; but stopping short of that instinctual formal process and dissecting it, what it looks like is a series of unanswered questions or assumptions that we don’t really think about too hard.
These are more than just problems at three speeches deep into a debate; these pertain throughout the entirety of a debate, and they recur in natural language conversations, but in an even messier way. And since natural-language sentences are infinitely extensible - this is arguably a condition of natural languages - and conversations are also infinitely extensible, this means it’s a messy, messy problem.
The way that Facebook and Twitter deal with this messy design problem of how to portray a potentially infinitely branching, infinitely extensible conversation is more than just a difference with URLs. This difference in structure goes all the way into the minor details of each, the decisions that each makes as far as user interface and user experience; it determines the “vibe”, or the ambient sense of personality, that each platform has.
The effect, on Twitter, becomes less about “visiting” other people’s spaces than it was connecting and adding to one’s own space as it is on Facebook. Either way, we’re talking about, essentially, different, more politicized forms of addictive social feedback. On Facebook, that feedback occurs in someone else’s notional space; on Twitter, a connection to someone else’s space or as a direct and somewhat peremptory intrusion into your own.
What makes it so particularly awful, I think, is that one cannot merely pretend that one has a separate space from the awful people running the platform, as one can on Facebook. No, on Twitter, it’s like the guy who couldn’t figure out COVID and got hundreds of his own workers infected, then, ironically, got COVID himself, multiple times… that guy is going to not just intrude on your space; he’s going to own it.
Well, at least we’ll still have Facebook.