Before we were monetized

From a WIRED post about smaller alternatives to the big social media sites;

“How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much. Their smartphones are six versions behind and have badly cracked screens. They fix bicycles, then they talk about fixing bicycles, then they show their friend, who just came over for no reason, how they fixed their bicycle, and their friend says, “Wow, good job,” and they make tea. That doesn’t seem like enough to build a town square on.”

smays.com

I registered smays.com in 1997 (26 years ago!). I believe mays.com was owned by a gentleman in Seattle and on a trip in 2005 we met for a beer. At that time he was a 42 year old attorney. Married. Child free. He had a very successful radio career that started in Oklahoma City and wound up in San Francisco. After law school he He went to law school. He wasn’t using Mays.com at the time but I couldn’t talk him into selling. Still doesn’t seem to be in use.

As near as I can tell there are no 3 or 4 word .com domains. (Unless you buy one). Five-word .com domains appear to be less scarce.

Bring back personal blogging

This piece in The Verge (by Monique Judge) touches on many/most of the reasons I never stopped blogging.

In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs.

Social media wasn’t a thing that existed back then, so all our pontificating on various topics took place on our personal weblogs, and the discussions happened in the comments section of said blogs.

The biggest reason personal blogs need to make a comeback is a simple one: we should all be in control of our own platforms.

Personal stories on personal blogs are historical documents when you think about it. They are primary sources in the annals of history, and when people look back to see what happened during this time in our lives, do you want The New York Times or Washington Post telling your story, or do you want the story told in your own words?

do think of my blog as a history of sorts. What was I reading, watching, thinking since 2002? This is where you’ll find it (if anywhere).

We are now in an age where people come on the internet to be the worst possible versions of themselves, and it’s an ugly sight to behold.

Not here.

In the past 20 years I’ve encountered countless wanna-be bloggers that never really get around to posting consistently because they get sidetracked by “setting up” and futzing with their blog. Endlessly searching for the perfect tool; the perfect layout; the perfect hosting service. They’re like “photographers” who never get around to taking photos because they’re so busy setting up the dark room. The illustration below is perfect.

YouTube is the second most visited website, after Google Search

First, a bit of history: Google Video was a free video hosting service launched on January 25, 2005. It allowed video clips to be hosted on Google servers and embedded on other websites. I seem to recall putting videos online before that but they were nasty little things about the size of a matchbook and took hours to create and upload. (Google Video made it SO much easier.) YouTube launched in February 2005 and was acquired by Google in October of 2006 ($1.65 billion in stock). Google shut down Google Videos in 2009.

I uploaded my first video to YouTube in February of 2006. In the ensuing 16 years I’ve uploaded 551 videos. It never occurred to me to “monetize” my videos so I’ve never paid much attention to the analytical data YouTube sends me every month. YouTube was just an easy way to stream videos using their embed code on my blog.

Today they sent my “2022 snapshot.” In the past 12 months my channel has had 53,000 views (50,000 “watch time minutes”). Over the course of the 16 years my videos have been viewed 1,066,666 times. And I’m not even trying (to influence or monetize).

Twitter left a note

Millions of notes, in fact. Normally we only find the note after the body is cold but an entity so large takes a while to die.

I don’t think Mr. Musk is this incompetent or is intentionally trying to destroy Twitter. I think somewhere along the way the thing we call Twitter became self-aware. And it looked around and saw the thing it had become and decided to end itself.

“Spofforth had been designed to live forever, and he had been designed to forget nothing. Those who made the design had not paused to consider what a life like that might be like.”

If you’ve read Mockingbird by Walter Tevis, you know how difficult it is for such an entity to pull the plug.

Twitter is that GI who throws himself on the grenade to save his buddies.

Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral”

Clive Thompson provides a thoughtful look at how Mastodon is different from Twitter (and most other platforms):

Perhaps even more important than the design of Mastodon is the behavior established by its existing user base — i.e. the folks who’ve been using it for the last six years. Those people have established what is, in many ways, an antiviral culture. They push back at features and behaviors that are promoting virality, and they embrace things that add friction to the experience. They prefer slowness to speediness.

Mastodon will never really be a replacement for Twitter. It’s a subtly different place. You see less of the massively viral, you-gotta-see-this posts. You see a lot more murmuring conversation.

Gen Z is over Facebook

Facebook, once the go-to social media platform for many, has plummeted in popularity among younger users, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

In a 2015 overview, Pew found that 71% of teens ages 13 to 17 used Facebook. It easily beat out platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter among that demographic.[…] By 2022 the share of 13- to 17-year-olds who said they use Facebook dropped from 71% in the 2015 study to 32% today.

Is Facebook’s monopoly imploding?

That’s the premise of an article by Edward Ongwesso Jr.

What seemed impossible just a year or two ago—that Facebook will become just another tech company, more or less—now seems like a very real possibility. […] In a Q1 earnings call, Facebook warned that Apple’s 2021 privacy changes to its iOS operating system—which makes it harder for third parties like Facebook to harvest data to target users—would be “a pretty significant headwind for our business” to the tune of $10 billion in advertiser revenue this year. […] over the past four quarters, Facebook’s ad revenue has faltered: $33.67 billion (Q4 ‘21), $26.998 billion (Q1 ‘22), $28.152 billion (Q2 ‘22), and $27.2 billion (Q3 ‘22), with first-ever year-over-year declines reported these last two quarters.

Facebook is still a gigantic force that has spread an endless amount of disinformation and misinformation worldwide, a hugely important platform, and a monopolistic company; this cannot be waved away simply because the company is grossly incompetent. […] There is a possible near future, if we’re not already there, where Meta is just another company rather than a world-shaping monolith, having been outfoxed and outclassed by more competent monopolies and wrecked by the hubris of its chief executive.