I feel for the perpetual jokesters, as they (kind of correctly) understand that vulnerabilities are frequently savaged by passing brigands. These quips are the only sort of communication they can engage in while keeping their shields up.
In systems design, people are fond of the saying "The purpose of a system is what it does". Which I think applies here.
It's fine to say that you think Letterboxd is a bad website, but I don't think it's very useful to say that Letterboxd is being "used incorrectly" by its most prolific and most popular users. You can wish that Letterboxd was "for" something other than sharing boring one sentence jokes, but POSIWID suggests that when you think it's "for" something other than what people are actually doing on it, you're wrong.
I think you're right about social media having this Weird Twitter gravity to it, but as Marshall McLuhan very astutely stated many years ago, having died before the internet even existed, "The medium is the message." People are complaining about the content when they should be thinking about the form. Social media has specific characteristics which incentivize this behavior. I think McLuhan's observations went way deeper than most people give him credit for, especially the Canadian oracle of media is something of an obscure academic figure these days.
Social media companies have very effectively developed methods of monetizing people's need for attention. They are good at it, and that's what social media is designed to do be it Twitter, X, Letterboxd, Reddit, or anything else. It's a mechanism for turning people's attention seeking behavior into cold hard cash and they've been very successful. The medium was never designed for serious, elevated conversations. It was designed to hold your attention and make people in Silicon Valley rich, and to that extent it has been quite successful.
Counterpoint: https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/037/159/covereric.jpg
I will never write or say anything as funny as this.
"Are you being sarcastic, dude?"
"I don't even know anymore."
I feel for the perpetual jokesters, as they (kind of correctly) understand that vulnerabilities are frequently savaged by passing brigands. These quips are the only sort of communication they can engage in while keeping their shields up.
In systems design, people are fond of the saying "The purpose of a system is what it does". Which I think applies here.
It's fine to say that you think Letterboxd is a bad website, but I don't think it's very useful to say that Letterboxd is being "used incorrectly" by its most prolific and most popular users. You can wish that Letterboxd was "for" something other than sharing boring one sentence jokes, but POSIWID suggests that when you think it's "for" something other than what people are actually doing on it, you're wrong.
I think you're right about social media having this Weird Twitter gravity to it, but as Marshall McLuhan very astutely stated many years ago, having died before the internet even existed, "The medium is the message." People are complaining about the content when they should be thinking about the form. Social media has specific characteristics which incentivize this behavior. I think McLuhan's observations went way deeper than most people give him credit for, especially the Canadian oracle of media is something of an obscure academic figure these days.
Social media companies have very effectively developed methods of monetizing people's need for attention. They are good at it, and that's what social media is designed to do be it Twitter, X, Letterboxd, Reddit, or anything else. It's a mechanism for turning people's attention seeking behavior into cold hard cash and they've been very successful. The medium was never designed for serious, elevated conversations. It was designed to hold your attention and make people in Silicon Valley rich, and to that extent it has been quite successful.