Rahul Gaitonde

I wrote this as a Twitter thread on the 1st of June 2023:

Reddit, like Twitter, is poised to become a one-app service. Great apps like Apollo will shut down at the end of the month. Here’s the tragedy of our online experiences, with Reddit as the current, ongoing example:

In 2023 ads remain the only way to mass-monetise online content. This means Reddit needs to own the entire customer experience even if apps are not core to its business.

1/

Because of this we’re seeing excellent apps like @tweetbot and, soon, @apolloreddit die because Twitter and Reddit can’t find a way to monetise users through these apps.

A vital part of the Internet is lost, and in small ways we go collectively backwards.

2/

This is not just a failure to find other ways to make money off people on the Internet. This is also an example of great being the enemy of good:

Reddit is rumoured to be going public, and needs to show they have maximised the monetisation potential of their user base

3/

It’s almost certain that the most engaged users of a service like Reddit will use third party apps that optimise for them.

Someone at Twitter recently claimed that 3rd party apps made up 17% of engagement.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-tweetbot-developers-fighting-twitter/

4/

It’s vital for Reddit to demonstrate that this user segment can be monetised. They must be forced to use the “main” app.

Twitter did this by simply turning off access to apps like Tweetbot. Reddit seems to be pricing this access prohibitively high. The result is the same.

5/

As the post by the Apollo creator says, Reddit could keep access open without denting revenue much.

One could argue it’s a net +ve because these users publish so much.

But it’s hard to directly link this content to added revenue from “regular” users & chart it in a deck.

6/

If ads are the only way to monetise & investors need to see every single user directly monetised, all social media will follow this path:

encourage 3rd party apps, attract power users to supercharge engagement, shut off access, corall all eyeballs into the standard app

7/

By shutting off differentiated experiences Reddit will now optimise for the mainstream.

Understandable for a social media co that’s going public because it’s, well, mainstream.

But like with Twitter, the most creative stuff came from those on the fringes. That’ll be lost.

8/

So there’s a good chance not only will we lose these delightful apps themselves, we’ll lose the essence of that social media itself.

Twitter doesn’t have interested automations, has limited parody accounts, no auto publishing from WordPress, no @IFTTT recipes – all gone.

9/

How do we prevent this from repeating?

I don’t think we can, not with today’s “centralised” social media model.

Facebook, Google+ RIP, Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok.

They all either never had third party apps & automations or they did & severely limited/shut them.

10/

But consider RSS feeds. No one company controls it; it’s a format not a site.

In fact after becoming the most popular RSS app, Google Reader was shut down 10 years ago.

This is notable: Google didn’t shut down 3rd party apps, it shut down its own app and got out of RSS

11/

Many thought Reader shutting down would kill RSS, but instead there are several great RSS reader apps – it’s a fabulous ecosystem.

Reader shutting down is what allowed these apps to bloom.

The Best RSS Feed Readers (Because the Internet Is a Mess)

12/

Newsletters are similar. You can use any email app you like to read your newsletters.

You can change the email address at which you receive them.

You can use whatever service you like to publish a newsletter.

There’s no Newsletter, Inc like there is a Reddit/Twitter.

13/

But, you say, these aren’t a set of groups/forums. Where is the decentralised Reddit?

Well, IRC still exists!

Internet Relay Chat

No one owns it. There’s no official IRC app – in fact there are many great ones today.

We can use IRC again. Or enhance it. It’s up to us.

14/

Our online experiences today are fragile.

They can be diminished, shut down because of a company’s priorities.

This thread is to remind us that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Different, welcoming, resilient experiences exist even today. We should use them more often.

N/ ★

An interesting thought in the context of this year’s Apple WWDC:

I think it’s past time Apple rework its keynote strategy, building these videos around features and not OSes, but that’s a blog post for a different day. For now, users can move between their Apple devices more fluidly and quickly than ever.

This has been one of Apple’s goals for its ecosystems for a long time,1 but the company has become more clear about it in recent years.

This made sense the moment I read it. Most people who value these inter-device features will, by definition, have more than one Apple device. Developers that want to build such specific features in to their apps will also want a feature-oriented narrative, not an OS-oriented one. It’s not like Apple needs to entice people to update the OS on their devices – that’s almost never been a problem.

Apple Notes gets inter-note linking in iOS 17, among other features:

I’m also impressed by Notes’ addition of internal linking to other notes. The update should allow for vastly better organization of information in Notes. I’m envisioning it as a solution for our internal documentation needs at MacStories, along with project management and a lot more. I’ve used Notes for that sort of thing before, but once a note reached a certain length, it became hard to manage, especially on smaller devices. With internal linking, I expect that will be a thing of the past.

I use Notes to dump all sorts of data for later processing, the way I used to use Evernote for a decade. I also use it to store medium-term data, such as working notes for an ongoing project (anything longer term is open formats like plain text or MS Office). I expect to use inter-note linking for these project notes quite often.

Daring Fireball on a demo for a connected wearable device that takes an anti-phone position:

Chaudhri thinks something is wrong that so many of us turn to our phones to photograph or film major moments in our lives, rather than just enjoying them through our own senses. I get it to some degree. If I’d been at that Lakers game, my phone would’ve been in my pocket at that moment, not just to absorb the actual game experience, but because I know that no photo I could take could possibly be as good as those being taken by courtside professional sports photographers. But those thousands of fans who did have their phones out for that moment weren’t thinking "_This sucks, I wish I didn’t have to stare at my phone to capture this._" They were thinking "_This is awesome and I’m glad I can capture this._"

People take their own photos at major events not because they think those will be great photos, but because they’re proof that they were there. Selfies are the new autographs, and a shaky iPhone photo from the perspective of your own seat at the event is the new certificate of attendance.

I’m quite sensitive to sounds, so I use white noise extensively to focus and to drown out distracting noises. Today I learnt about brown noise:

brown noise is the familiar, staticky sound of white noise (that is, all the audible frequencies simultaneously) but with the low frequency notes augmented and the less pleasant high frequency notes turned down, counteracting the human ear’s natural tendency to hear higher frequencies louder.

Here’s an example (YouTube) of what brown noise sounds like.

It sounds less harsh than the white noise I’m used to. I’m going to give this a try over the next few days to see (hear?) if it’s as effective as white noise at drowning out the sounds that are typically around me.

(Via 512 Pixels)

One of the most dramatic examples of the distortions caused by the Mercator projection: swapping Greenland and Mexico.

Here's another from @neilrkaye comparing Mexico with Greenland pic.twitter.com/P6F9SDnX6f

— Tomas Pueyo (@tomaspueyo) April 14, 2023

From Jason Kottke’s post marking the 25-year anniversary of his eponymous website:

It’s an absurd understatement to say that the web has changed a lot in the nearly 30 years since… it’s now a massive, overwhelmingly corporate entity that encompasses and organizes an ever-growing share of human information and activity… [but] the core of my own personal experience of the web has always been self-expression and making websites for individual humans to read & experience.

That web still exists, but just like in those early years, you’re going to have to discover, curate and bookmark it/subscribe to it on your own. It’s not hard, but it does need to be deliberate.

We cannot and should not expect new, more passive means of discovery (search and recommendation algorithms) to deliver the same independently published web of old.

The Apple Mail app in recent versions of iOS and Mac OS includes the new Follow Up feature:

If you send a message and don’t receive a response for several days, the email automatically moves back to the top of your inbox to help you remember to follow up.

But it can’t distinguish between email that’s meant to receive a reply and that which isn’t. I’ve increasingly been posting to this blog via email, and both my phone and Mac remind me that I haven’t heard back from WordPress, and if I’d like to follow up with it.

Which is what will happen with this post too.

📱

Any organisation that wants to be trusted long-term should ideally publish from a URL it owns and have an RSS feed (that functions as a notification mechanism). Doesn’t matter if it’s short- or long-form.

From Axios:

PBS has not tweeted from its main Twitter handle since April 8, following Elon Musk’s decision to label the outlet “government-funded news.”

NPR said Wednesday it was suspending its use of Twitter after the platform labeled it “government-funded.”

The journalist Matt Taibbi has been “shadow banned“:

Mashable’s Matt Binder solved the mystery and revealed, somewhat hilariously, that Taibbi’s acount appears to have been “max deboosted” or, in Twitter’s terms, had the highest level of visibility filters applied, meaning you can’t find Taibbi in search.

NPR and PBS have their own websites, of course, and Taibbi has published at his own URL Racket News. Even though Taibbi’s site is a Substack newsletter, he can move it to whatever online publishing platform he likes while keeping his online presence unchanged at that URL.

Far, far less consequentially, this site has existed since 2004 at this URL. Social networks have come and gone, and this site itself has been published on Movable Type, Blogger and WordPress, but the URL has remained the same.

An argument in favour of social networks is how easy it is to subscribe to someone’s posts – you just tap ‘follow’, and posts show up in your feed.

RSS is less convenient – but not a great deal. You paste the site’s address into your RSS reader, confirm and… that’s it. If you like you can organise your feeds by folder, but you don’t have to.

What you get in return is writing from those that you follow, untampered by boosting/de-boosting algorithms like on social networks, and without risk of shadow-banning or de-platforming. If they publish it, you’ll see it.

If you’re a news organisation or independent journalist, offering that kind of experience to your readers as your primary online presence is a must long-term.

This post is, well, for posterity. To record that the Elon-Musk-owned Twitter Inc auto-responds to all press inquiries with a "poop" emoji:

Going forward it will automatically reply to journalists’ inquiries with a single poop emoji, Musk announced… When asked for comment on Monday morning, Twitter promptly responded to NPR’s email with a scat symbol.

NPR also posted a screenshot of its experience:

This post has no particular significance than to record this for my future self’s chuckles.