Is This Anything? 9
I recently tried to get off Twitter, and have therefore spent more time on Tumblr and Reddit. It's interesting to me that (as best I can tell from the outside) there's a spectrum of repeated-interaction-with-the-same-people-ness that goes from Facebook to Tumblr to Twitter to Reddit:
- On Facebook I would interact with the same group of people repeatedly (my actual friends), with occasional additions from friends-of-friends;
- I don't really understand Tumblr and don't have an account there, but the accounts I browsed seemed to largely interact/reblog the same few other accounts repeatedly;
- on Twitter I largely interact with the same people repeatedly, but The Algorithm throws new people into my feed intermittently, some of whom are randos to me;
- on Reddit it seems like you're mainly just interacting with an undifferentiated mass of people – there's no profile photos, everything feels open to strangers by default, and I have never paid attention to who is posting something and expected to see them again in future. (I'm sure this is different in some subreddits, also I don't understand Reddit either, please don't shout at me).
I think this is a fundamental difference between these networks, but I haven't heard anyone really talk about it? A priori it feels bigger than even e.g. real name vs pseudonym in terms of the impact it "should" have on user behaviour.
There's an old saw about a Yosemite park ranger struggling to design a usable trash-can that couldn't get broken into by by bears, because "there is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."
I recently received this captcha, which I initially failed. I'm not sure what to do with a world where there's considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest machines and the dumbest humans.
