And I don't mean that in the self-derogatory *nudge nudge* way. My interests are boring to the vast majority of people. I'm fine with that, different strokes for different folks, eh? The issue is that social media is about attention and you get attention by not being boring, unless you embrace a lolcow status.
Sure, you can say that you don't care about views, I truly don't. Some of the very best times in my life has been when I had a conversation with a handful of people. Some of them have been truly
enrichening experiences. Some of my worst was when I hit tens of thousands of people worth of attention. But saying I do social media but I don't care about attention is just not honest. If you post something publicly you want it to receive some degree of attention or nobody really does hear when your tree falls in the forest.
I've decided to start fiddling with socialmedia again. Not the major platforms but the
fediverse versions. So far they have been.. fine, I guess. Not much activity but also no negative activity at all. And again, I'm boring. If I hadn't been maybe there would have been more activity?
But I've found myself in a bizarre state of attempting to force engagement. I can spend 20 minutes trying to find a post to like or reply to. I even added
mochajot reminders to "Be nice to someone on [bluesky, mastodon, pixelfed]". That's absurd. If it happens organically, sure, but I don't doomscroll. How the heck do you find something or someone to be nice to if you don't mindlessly scroll?
This isn't me. I need to change things up.
I've been meaning to make a quiz site for a while. You know, those shorts that pop up on video with a multiple-choice question that you don't immediately flick away and instead go "hmm.. it's c, right?" I love those things to bits. The site will be a nice tie-in for my webassembly projects too. I can programmatically generate the shorts videos for youtube but also keep the bandwidth on the site itself to an absolute minimum by having the quizzes be generated on the fly in assembly.
For my social media accounts I believe I'll just pick single genre of my interests and stick to it. But the question is, should I do it under my own name or just keep my anderstonfeldt accounts for mindless posting about whatever happens in my day to day life?
I generally dislike anonymity. I think the world would be a much better place if everyone had to use their real names for socialmedia. It'd allow a level of accountability that wouldn't reward letting the most primal, offensive version of yourself run rampant across the web.
But accounts not tied to a person but a concept are quite interesting. I've followed many parody accounts, news "bots", genre specific art channels and so forth over the years. In general I find them much more appealing than hearing the political take of someone half my age who has never left his or her own country but claim to understand the inner workings of international geo-politics.
I'm extremely interested in seeing what people do with AI going forwards. There's so much white-knighting and knee-jerk hatred of it right now, just like when any new disruptive technology is introduced. The fact that there's not just ethically generated but commercially indemnifying datasets seem to completely fly under these people's radar. Or they're intentionally ignoring that fact because they're really only in it for the outrage.
What AI offers for anonymous accounts is truly staggering when you consider it. Will it be used to bait the weakminded out of their coins? Yes. Will it be used to peddle misinformation? Yes. Will there be outright subversive movements designed to undermine establishments? Yes. Of course, all of those things have been going on for millennia before AI was ever a possibility. It'll just be more accessible. A truly democratic way of allowing anyone to be a deceptive asshole.
But it also offers the possibility of comedy, information and positive societal change being generated by people who never could do any of those things before. I had a brief conversation with a wheelchair bound person with an extreme speech impediment (I didn't ask). He noted how text to speech, image and now video generation allowed him to have a social media presence that wasn't just a group of people either pitying or making fun of him.
He could generate the version of himself he always wanted to be. And he didn't generate some sigma endboss chad, he generated a fairly normal person. But he could finally make his point without the entire focus of every single interaction he had with other people ultimately focusing on him and his disabilities. I don't give a shit what your stance on AI is, that is a thing of pure beauty.
My intention is to explore this facet, not so much with AI necessarily but the concept of putting forth facets of myself, of my personality, without the total sum of it. I'll slice off the parts I know are to my own detriment and keep the rest.
I think this could be a much more rewarding type of interaction with socialmedia. Or it'll be a shitshow. We'll see.