fLaMEd’s post about instant messaging programs got me thinking about my own IM journey. I’m too young to really have experienced the peak AIM and MSN days, but I did use MSN/Windows Live Messenger in the late 00s to keep up with some online friends I had met through various forums. Eventually, I moved to Skype as that is what all my IRL friends were on at the time. I was also on Curse Voice for the brief time it existed, mostly for voice calls during League of Legends matches. As Skype started dying out, I moved over to Discord in 2016, which made me a pretty early adopter.
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It is an interesting time to be online. Twitter went from bad to worse. Reddit kneecapped itself. It seems now that the period of free money is over, tech companies are finding out that operating at a loss to amass users and putting off any sort of monetization plan as long as possible isn’t as great a business model as was once thought. So far it appears to only work in a monopolistic scenario, like with Google and perhaps Meta. Everyone else hasn’t really hit that critical mass. The only thing of value these companies have is the data they host, which is now being siphoned for free by AI products, then repackaged and regurgitated to the consumer. To defend against this, both Reddit and Twitter have removed free access to their API and are charging exorbitant prices to restore access. The result is shittier platforms for the user, who create the entirety of the platform’s value in the first place.
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I can’t seem to find a healthy way to use TikTok, so I just shouldn’t use it at all. I first installed it during the height of the pandemic in 2020 and have since uninstalled and reinstalled it at least 4 or 5 times. While there is a huge load of shit on the platform, there are also cool and interesting creators on there, lots of funny jokes, shitposts, and memes, and even videos where I legitmately learned something! However, short-form video scares me as a social media format because of how addicting it is. TikTok’s algorithm in particular is so good at showing you what you want to see that you can’t help but scroll. It got to the point where I was reaching for my phone and scrolling TikTok every time I had a free minute. On my worst days, this would sometimes last hours. Just scrolling. Filling up my brain with content of dubious quality and intentions. TikTok is also experiencing a rise in Internet discourse and outrage culture on the platform. Due to the short virality cycle of content on TikTok, it seems to be speedrunning the same discourse Tumblr did a decade ago. It’s exhausting. I’m tired of all interaction online being subject “discourse”. I’m tired of hot takes. I’m tired of hearing the unwanted opinion of every random online.
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So that’s it. Twitter reached a deal with Elon Musk. There’s not much to say that hasn’t already been said. I want to believe Musk will make improvements, but I think whatever improvements he makes will please the wrong crowd of people. Twitter has a monopoly on the type of platform it provides, which puts him in a unique position of power, especially with all the fuss US lawmakers have been making about free speech on Twitter and elsewhere online.
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