Hi everyone, it’s Thursday, two days after the election. This is the Timetable microcast.
So, that was a disaster.
I’m walking to the coffee shop. I started sort of a new routine day after the election. Wak, not to the closest coffee shop, walk a little further like a mile mile and a half. Give myself a chance to think. I’m unplugging from all news, cable news, websites, and refocusing on Micro.blog and work.
That is what keeps me motivated and I was reflecting a bit on how I changed after the 2016 election. I was very sad. And I’ve blogged about that.
After the 2020 election, all wrapped up with covid. I was a little bit on the edge. I think we all sort of lost our minds a little bit.
And now 2024… And I guess i’m coming around and maybe you’ll see a new side of me a little bit. I gonna be a little more impulsive. I’m gonna actually take action instead of waiting months and months. I’m gonna follow my gut more. I I guess I always follow my gut to an extent and Micro.blog has sort of its own path in the social web. I’m going to double down on that.
I have some ideas to really make it its own thing. It’s already I think pretty unique In the architecture and I think it should also be unique in tone, design. So i’m excited about that.
I’ve done a whole bunch of work yesterday focused ignoring everything else in the world. But I do I do think i’m feeling more impatient and I’m definitely upset. And I need to channel that with something good. Something positive.
There are a couple explanations for what the hell just happened. One is well, it turns out this country is just as racist, misogynist, fearful of immigrants as we worried it was.
This is the sort of famous basket of deplorables comment that Hillary Clinton made. She walked it back a little bit. But like everything she said she was right.
The other explanation is really the thing that I’m more interested in that is misinformation. But we know in 2016 misinformation was a huge problem Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and the fallout from that. If anything it is much worse now because not only do people get sucked into conspiracy rabbit holes that the algorithm thinks they want to see we have these new platforms that are extremely addictive. TikTok, teens getting sucked in to TikTok for hours, not understanding what just happened and where the time went.
And being again led down these rabbit holes and these false paths. As just one example of the election there are millions of people that don’t know Trump had been convicted of crimes. There are millions of people that never heard the Access Hollywood tape. They don’t actually know it’s hard to believe that there are millions of people that don’t know who he is. Why?
We have amplification even on mainstream social networks of sort of the worst views things that are engaging. Things that are clickbait, things that are provocative, people who are performing for an audience instead of just posting their thoughts. Ad-based platforms, they’re just susceptible to these problems by default because it’s about engagement about clicks, it’s about feeding you as many things as possible to keep you engaged. Facebook is now experimenting with AI-generated content that you might want to see so now we’re being fed things we might want to see they’re not from real humans.
I think AI has a lot of really practical uses but not that. That’s like the terrible end-game of the algorithmic timeline. No, thanks.
Let’s do things that are on my mind right now. Redesigned Micro.com home page. I started this yesterday. It’s not it’s gonna be like halfway or less than halfway where I want it to be. But i’ve decided to just ship it. If you go to Micro.blog right now and you’re not signed in you’ll see completely different design, just has some painting in the background, has some quotes, super minimalist.
And the other thing is I really do want to reach more people. But instead of going free and reaching more people I want to go kind of even more paid and reach more people, if that makes sense. So i’m thinking about an even cheaper plan.
I think five dollars is an absolute steal for what Micro.blog offers. What if there was even a cheaper plan of five dollars, reach more people, forget about the trial, forget about paid, a fair price.
It’s accessible to almost everyone. De-emphasize the free features. There’s plenty of places on the social web to write and share photos for free. I don’t think we need to compete with that. But I do want to reach more people. I want to make it more valuable.
It is a little bit frustrating sometimes when people describe the perfect platform they want to see and they’ve described Micro.blog and we’ve been doing this for seven years. Like, hello, we’re right over here. Right over here.
And you know when I started micro.blog, I got a lot of pushback like why don’t you have public likes? Why don’t you have retweets? Why don’t you have hashtags? Why don’t you have trends?
And I was sort of saying well, this is why and this is why, no one really got it and I think that’s you know, luckily, I think I never sort of succumbed to pressure and those things and now I have the luxury of not having those features and now I can really again follow my gut and build a platform that is a little quieter a little calmer. A platform that hopefully doesn’t fuel the outrage machine. But I am angry. I’m gonna keep doing this podcast as I can.
It’s been a long time. And I don’t know, maybe I’ll get in the habit of doing it on this walk. Starting to rain a bit. Should’ve checked the weather, more just a drizzle though.
I hope everybody’s doing as best as they can today. Thank you for your support.
There is a lot to do. Let’s get to work.
