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brin_bellway[cw: death, anxiety, fairly abstract discussion of bullying]
[Remains of the Day; Wayback] (by Eugene Wei; h/t Matt Levine)
It is, perhaps, telling that in 20k words he doesn't mention Tumblr *once*†. IME, it is something of a consensus on Tumblr--one I entirely agree with--that fame beyond a certain level is *bad*. We pity the people with six-digit notes, even as we reblog from them. If Instagram is for people who play status games to win, perhaps Tumblr is for people who instinctively know that *both* extremes of status are dangerous: peasants get left to die in the gutter of treatable illnesses, but monarchs get assassinated.
(When that drive for approval kicked in upon reaching adolescence, it didn't feel like what people told me it would feel like. It felt--still feels--like an acute awareness that literally anyone *could* hurt me if they wanted to, kill me if they wanted to badly enough, and the desperate need to ensure that nobody ever wants to. Note that "not letting them know you exist" is a rather effective method of preventing someone from wanting to hurt you.)
I try to manage my level of status in both directions and err on the side of lowness (one might find other ways of obtaining illness treatment, but assassination is hard to guard against), careful not to post anything that I think might go *too* viral. Playing to win can be fun under *very particular* circumstances, only among communities known for their high rates of compersion and low rates of death threats. Even then, I thought long and hard before daring to openly state my intention to go after a Boolean. (for those of you who do not speak Flight Rising, the pertinent information: fewer than 100 such items exist, and they cost more money than the vast majority of players will ever make, let alone have at one time)
---
Not only is having too many followers a bad thing, so is ephemerality. I don't understand the appeal of Snapchat: who among us does not enjoy re-reading old chat logs? Who among us has not wished that meatspace came with re-readable chat logs?
(I have *some* audio logs, but they're harder to parse, *much* harder to search, and take up more space. Pictures are even worse, and videos worse still.)
---
>>Come for the fame, stay for the tool?
Foursquare was this for me. In the beginning, I checked in to try to win mayorships at random places. These days, Foursquare is trying to become more of a utility, with information on places around you, rather than just a quirky distributed social capital game. Heavier users may have thoughts on how successful that has been, but in just compiling a database of locations that other apps can build off of, they have built up a store of utility.<<
I made a Foursquare account purely to add to their database of locations so that I could then use the database improvements on WiFiMap.io. I have never cared about Foursquare qua Foursquare, only about the utility they provide to apps I *do* care about.
---
>>It's a shame as Google could probably use social as an added layer of utility in many of their products, especially in Google Maps.<<
Uh, I *definitely* know people who chase Google Maps contribution achievements (including such achievements as "have 1 million cumulative views across your contributed images"). I don't see how that's different from the Yelp Elite stuff he talks about later.
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>>From a user perspective, people are starting to talk more and more about the soul-withering effects of playing an always-on status game through the social apps on their always connected phones<<
you see what I mean about assuming everyone has mobile data
---
†Mind you, I've heard that Twitter is akin to a concentrated essence of bad-parts-of-Tumblr, and he *does* mention Twitter harassment...in a one-paragraph aside, before immediately going back to the assumption that everyone wants as much attention as possible, including on Twitter.
[Remains of the Day; Wayback] (by Eugene Wei; h/t Matt Levine)
It is, perhaps, telling that in 20k words he doesn't mention Tumblr *once*†. IME, it is something of a consensus on Tumblr--one I entirely agree with--that fame beyond a certain level is *bad*. We pity the people with six-digit notes, even as we reblog from them. If Instagram is for people who play status games to win, perhaps Tumblr is for people who instinctively know that *both* extremes of status are dangerous: peasants get left to die in the gutter of treatable illnesses, but monarchs get assassinated.
(When that drive for approval kicked in upon reaching adolescence, it didn't feel like what people told me it would feel like. It felt--still feels--like an acute awareness that literally anyone *could* hurt me if they wanted to, kill me if they wanted to badly enough, and the desperate need to ensure that nobody ever wants to. Note that "not letting them know you exist" is a rather effective method of preventing someone from wanting to hurt you.)
I try to manage my level of status in both directions and err on the side of lowness (one might find other ways of obtaining illness treatment, but assassination is hard to guard against), careful not to post anything that I think might go *too* viral. Playing to win can be fun under *very particular* circumstances, only among communities known for their high rates of compersion and low rates of death threats. Even then, I thought long and hard before daring to openly state my intention to go after a Boolean. (for those of you who do not speak Flight Rising, the pertinent information: fewer than 100 such items exist, and they cost more money than the vast majority of players will ever make, let alone have at one time)
---
Not only is having too many followers a bad thing, so is ephemerality. I don't understand the appeal of Snapchat: who among us does not enjoy re-reading old chat logs? Who among us has not wished that meatspace came with re-readable chat logs?
(I have *some* audio logs, but they're harder to parse, *much* harder to search, and take up more space. Pictures are even worse, and videos worse still.)
---
>>Come for the fame, stay for the tool?
Foursquare was this for me. In the beginning, I checked in to try to win mayorships at random places. These days, Foursquare is trying to become more of a utility, with information on places around you, rather than just a quirky distributed social capital game. Heavier users may have thoughts on how successful that has been, but in just compiling a database of locations that other apps can build off of, they have built up a store of utility.<<
I made a Foursquare account purely to add to their database of locations so that I could then use the database improvements on WiFiMap.io. I have never cared about Foursquare qua Foursquare, only about the utility they provide to apps I *do* care about.
---
>>It's a shame as Google could probably use social as an added layer of utility in many of their products, especially in Google Maps.<<
Uh, I *definitely* know people who chase Google Maps contribution achievements (including such achievements as "have 1 million cumulative views across your contributed images"). I don't see how that's different from the Yelp Elite stuff he talks about later.
---
>>From a user perspective, people are starting to talk more and more about the soul-withering effects of playing an always-on status game through the social apps on their always connected phones<<
---
†Mind you, I've heard that Twitter is akin to a concentrated essence of bad-parts-of-Tumblr, and he *does* mention Twitter harassment...in a one-paragraph aside, before immediately going back to the assumption that everyone wants as much attention as possible, including on Twitter.
