#i don't want algorithm doom scrolling like Twitter

[fortunately-bi]

God after that rant in the tags I really do miss old Tumblr. Like not just for the nsfw stuff but also like, I miss all of the people I used to follow who disappeared and I never found. I miss the stuff I can't find anymore because it got unfairly nuked during the ban, I miss not having ads, I miss not having weird layouts and random blogs pushed on me and Tumblr live giving me heart attacks every time I think I accidentally clicked one. Like for a long while this site was just left alone with the occasional update and different color of blue and we all just kinda existed(at least that's how my dash looked). Tumblr feels like walking into a house I used to live in but now someone else lives there and they painted the walls a different color they changed a bunch of things. Like it's still the same layout, there's still things that pop up sometimes that poke at the nostalgia but it just feels weird.

[ameliapples]

I see people on other platforms talking about cohost going down and I generally see the same few complaints being trotted out over and over as the reasons why it failed and was doomed to fail from the start. "It kept logging me out", "there was no app", "my timeline was always dead", "I got so little engagement", "I had to wait how long before I could post??". It's the stuff people have complained about with the platform forever, and while I think these complaints are generally a bit silly, they do arrive at what's probably the real reason we're all mourning the impending death of eggbug without realizing it.

A big part of what made cohost so different from other social media platforms is that it was the only platform where you had to actually want to be there. Every other platform is basically designed to hold you at gunpoint and force your attention and engagement 24/7. The gun in this situation being mostly fomo - everything is happening so rapidly, there's so much to keep track of, what if you miss something? what if it's something really big and you don't tweet about it within the first 5 minutes of it happening? what if you miss the next Main Character? there's a new one every day and they're forgotten as quickly as they arrive, but a month from now someone's gonna bring it up as a joke and you won't get it and you'll look lame and cringe! you don't want to look Lame and also Cringe, do you?

cohost never felt that way. If you were there, it was because you genuinely wanted to be. The site was designed to ensure that, even. You had to wait about a week after you made an account to ensure you weren't a spam bot before you could post at all. Once you could post, there was no algorithm. None. Nothing was fed into your feed that wasn't directly posted to a tag you follow or a person you follow. If you wanted to see something outside of that, you'd have to do the legwork browsing tags yourself. For budgetary reasons, there was never an app, so you had to either learn to set up a shortcut icon on your phone or else open it manually in a browser. It also logged you out every 30 days as a privacy and security measure. You had to want to jump through all these hoops to use cohost.

And what did you get for doing the effort? Peace. A social media environment that didn't feel like you were constantly stood in the center of Time Square with all the noise and marquees and heckling voices focused directly at you at all times. It didn't try to be a news site, or an advertising platform. No algorithm meant you only got what you actively chose to see, and nothing more. You could say in your head "lemme check cohost real quick", and you could be up-to-date on your timeline in under 5 minutes. It was a place you would willingly go to check in on friends or look at cool art or play around with html like it was 2004 again, not get sucked into for hours doom scrolling. Because there was no algorithm, no push for engagement, no numbers that publicly went up, no one was competing for attention or clout. No one I ever met on cohost was immediately antagonistic, or rude, or trying to dunk someone. People were chill, FRIENDLY even, in a way I have never seen on twitter or tumblr even back in "the good ol days". The adversarial, cliquey, petty nonsense we all expect from social media was almost entirely absent. It was peaceful, quiet. It was the only social media platform I've used to not give me anxiety, or a migraine.

So of course it fell apart. We live in a world where things require money to simply exist, and cohost was designed basically not to make any by virtue of having virtues. It refused to advertise, sell user data in any way, open a weird shop where you can put microscopic pngs next to your name, or force people's worst impulses in order to keep them on the site for as long as possible. It ran off merch purchases and cohost plus, which was meant to give you premium features but never got the chance to do much more than upping your file size limit on uploads. It was essentially a $5 a month donation. It wasn't enough, clearly.

So now it's going, but I don't really think saying it "failed" is right. If anything, it's made it clear what a failure the rest of the social media ecosystem is. Usually when a platform is dying, or looks to be dying (in the case of twitter, or tumblr post 2018), people immediately make plans to jump ship to a new one. But upon hearing that cohost was shutting down, my reaction, as well as that of a pretty large portion of the user base, was that we'd rather spend time on other things. Cohost was so different an atmosphere it seems to have had a healing property on people who used it. It wasn't perfect, moderation was spotty at times due to the limited staff, people had their blind spots and biases they sometimes struggled to work through. But it was better than what we've grown to expect. It made you realize how tiring the rest of the internet has become, and that you don't need to deal with it. You can better spend that time, doing things you enjoy with people you enjoy. Maybe even outside, if you can muster it. You might even meet some cool people out there, wearing cool patches, eulogizing a cool little website, with a funny lil bug shaped like an egg.

[luminantvoid]

I don't ever want to use another social media site again. I wanted to start an OnlyFans and they required other social media links to prove my identity. I gave them my Youtube and Tumblr links, but those were deemed insufficient. They gave me instructions to create a Twitter account and said that a few pictures of myself and other activity over 5-7 days would be enough.

I did that.

I was still rejected.

So, I continued posting photos and chatting and getting more invested for a few more weeks. Eventually, recently, I tried to apply for verification again only to once again be rejected.

At that point I had become invested in Twitter though, I had a few followers and was following a couple dozen, and by that point I had also contracted Twitter brain rot.

At first it is slow, you just get a few tweets to read, stuff you've subscribed to, nice stuff. Slowly though the algorithm recommends more and it quickly becomes a doom scroll of short 140 character intrusive schizophrenic thoughts from random anime character profiles. It's a horrendous mix of satire, sarcasm, short silly thoughts, inflammatory content, lewd content, etc and despite it all you get hardly any interaction when you do reply or quote things.

You end up just joining the sea of forgotten disembodied voices if you choose to participate.

I've uninstalled the app today because it got to the point where I don't sleep and I don't have any appetite and hours go by that I can't remember what I was doing xD

My life was fantastic and productive pre-2014 and then I tried Facebook. That cursed me for a whole 4 years before I got back to my hobbies. Then I ended up in a relationship that drained a bunch of my time and effort. Neither of those affected me as deeply as Twitter managed in a few weeks. I am going to get back to my life now lmao

Short form content just feels like the ultimate psychological harm. If I could make a social media site myself, I would require all videos be at least 3 minutes and a character minimum of 4000 to post. Thank you for reading my rant if you made it this far <3

[shinxeysartgallery]

I've run into a few blogs on this site that say they hate it if you like or reblog a ton of their posts at one instance and will be blocked on sight if you do. I guess I kinda understand not liking the like spamming in a way, since this site doesn't operate like Twitter or Instagram, so likes are meaningless here in terms of getting a larger audience for your content. Reblogs are the only thing that get your content spread to a wider audience. But with that said, I don't get the hate around reblog spamming, since that's literally how content is spread around the site. You'd think people would be happy about having their stuff shown to more people and get more attention on them. And if it's a case of "I don't want my notifications flooded!" then I'm pretty sure I saw a setting where you can turn off likes (I think reblogs, too) in your settings panel so you don't actually get notified when someone likes your posts.

But yeah, if you're scrolling through my blog and see a ton of posts you want to like or reblog, go for it. I've got something like 2k posts at the time of writing this and if you want to like or reblog all 2,000 of them, then you go for that, too. I have zero issue with that 'cause that helps out everyone.

That's the one beautiful thing about Tumblr; even though likes don't spread posts around like on other social medias, the posts live longer. On a site like Twitter, for example, if your post doesn't pop off pretty much as soon as you post it, it will never gain any sort of traction and is doomed to die and get buried in the algorithm. On here though? A post can be "dead" for months before a lucky person finds it somewhere, reblogs it to their page, and the post is revived, even if briefly.

I don't understand the concept of hating "like spamming" or "reblog spamming". As someone with ADHD and hyperfocus, if you go onto my blog and get lost in the sauce enough to practically reblog the last 5 days worth of stuff I reblogged then good on you my dude my friend my bean, please keep it up I'm glad you like it have a cookie fam, you deserve it cause we have the same taste and I feel like my blog is a public library of stuff I find entertaining so enjoy the browse.

[sofiadragon]

On the one hand, it is an American platform privately run and full of manipulative algorithm nonsense that brings out the absolute worst in the people who use it daily as much as the designers want people to use it (hours of doom scrolling or compulsive checking at least once every hour they are awake, for example.)

On the other, it has been a useful platform for getting marginalized voices heard and amplifying stories that would otherwise been difficult to get out all over the world with a slim chance that any tweet might go viral if it hits just right. It was used during disasters where internet is dodgy, especially back in the early days when the ads were simpler and didn't eat precious bandwidth before the rest of the page loaded, and still is thanks to linked/stripped down apps that can post to twitter without actually loading twitter so people can at least say they aren't dead. We see tweets from Ukraine during an attack.

But, we don't need twitter to do these things. There are other apps, and as this one flames out I'm seeing more of my family back on Facebook (which really seems like just a place for baby and vacation pictures or keeping up with long distance friends who are fading into acquaintances these days.) I'm not sure twitter will go all the way down, and I don't know what might replace it (not 'Meta', that much seems clear) but it might be good for journalists to get off twitter and go back to getting emails and phone calls about leads instead of mentions. At least for a little bit, to remind us that twitter isn't the whole world, and it really is an echo chamber by design that insulates far more than it amplifies.

“Musk’s egomania drove him to buy and inevitably ruin Twitter because he hoped to transform it into X, his totalitarian “everything app” WeChat clone he wanted to send us to space with. But there is another, simpler narrative here. A man who grew up in apartheid South Africa, whose family owned a diamond mine, who made his name helping cyberlibertarians bypass banking laws, manipulating the US tax system to build faulty self-driving cars, and shooting rockets into space in the hopes of establishing debt slavery on Mars, bought an app built by activists and Black Americans, and that is relied on by the Global South as a valuable democratic tool, and is used by journalists around the world as a free and open source of information, and tried to turn it into his personal country club. This is just the mundane nightmare of watching a wealthy man wreck his new plaything — an imperfect, but vital communication system for some of the most vulnerable and marginalized communities in the world. This is a colonialist doing what colonialists do. And I hope that when this embarrassing circus is over, we can figure out how to build something back that someone like Musk can’t turn into his new diamond mine.”

—

One giant slow-motion fail whale

This is a colonialist doing what colonialists do.

This is a colonialist doing what colonialists do.

This is a colonialist doing what colonialists do.

This is a colonialist doing what colonialists do.

This is a colonialist doing what colonialists do.

This is a colonialist doing what colonialists do.

(via wilwheaton)