On Transitions

And the central role of self-congratulatory horseshit

A bit of nonsense generated from the prompt “changing social media services”

I first got on something that is recognizably an ancestor of modern social media in the winter of 1992. That year was the first that Williams assigned every student an email account (though I had had one for a year or so prior thanks to a CS class I took during a Winter Study term), which included access to a bunch of early Internet services including Gopher, through which I stumbled across Usenet newsgroups. I was there before the Endless September of 1993, though only just barely.

I mostly settled in the rec.arts.sf.written group (secondarily rec.sports.basketball.college), which quickly became riven by a conflict between fans of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series (then only a few books in) and other folks who thought the Jordan traffic was excessive. I was part of the group that pushed for the creation of rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan, which then became my primary Usenet home. That was a pretty free-wheeling space, passing a lot of the (ever-increasing) time between books with arguments about politics and general random silliness. A core group of heavy posters to r.a.s.w.r-j got pretty close, and we had a bunch of in-person meet-ups; I’m not sure what the final tally is for long-term relationships formed through that group, but it certainly includes me and Kate.

In 2000 (give or take) I started reading a bunch of the early blogs, and in 2001 Kate and I both started booklogs, writing short reviews about whatever we read. In 2002 I launched a general blog, Uncertain Principles (the archives of that are kind of screwed up, but this shows the first post, at least…) where I wrote about my new role as a junior faculty member at a small college, and did posts explaining various topics in physics.

In late 2006 or so, I was invited to be part of the first batch of authors under the ScienceBlogs banner, a new initiative being sponsored by SEED magazine (which was a short-lived glossy mag putting a glamorous spin on science; my stock snarky description of it was “Maxim for Nerds,” which is also a badly dated reference…). There were 14 blogs in the initial group, covering a wide range of topics, and initially it was a pretty tight community with a private back-channel discussion board, and some in-person meetups. I think there’s at least one long-term relationship that came out of that, too.

ScienceBlogs went through some waves of expansion, and then spasms of contraction (generally associated with some big media/politics controversy). I think it was north of 60 blogs at one point, which is a little crazy. At one point it was taken over by National Geographic, which got a little weird when they tried to enforce some standards that bloggers didn’t care for, and then it was spun off and limped along as a free-standing enterprise for a while before shutting down in 2017 (the final form is visible here, frozen in digital amber).

Toward the end of that process, I got hooked up with Forbes, and blogged for them for several years. That started out pretty free-wheeling, and then got increasingly corporate. I haven’t completely cut ties with them— I think I technically could start posting there again if I wanted to— but it reached the point of being more of a hassle than anything else, so it’s been a few years since I wrote anything for them.

In parallel with this, a bunch of other social media sites came and went. I’ve had a Facebook account since it was restricted to people with .edu emails from a (large but still) limited set of schools, and I got on (ex-)Twitter circa 2009 (at the insistence of my first book editor). There was a brief glorious window when Google Plus was pretty great (largely because a lot of r.a.s.w.r-j folks moved there), and I had a LiveJournal account for a while, then Dreamwidth (again, largely to keep up with folks from Usenet). I’ve got an Instagram account that I use somewhat regularly and a YouTube channel that’s basically inactive, and I draw the line at TikTok.

This Substack dates to the summer of 2021, when I decided I wanted another blog-like outlet that offered the potential for somewhat higher visibility and also the chance to get a little beer money (you can, if you feel inclined to tip your humble correspondant, sign up for a paid subscription to this Substack, though I haven’t decided to professionalize this to the point of having members-only content or the like). I’ve had no real complaints— Substack is exceedingly low touch, and the platform works very smoothly— but, you know, nothing lasts forever.

I felt moved to rattle off this long and nerdy history because we’re in the middle of another spasm of social-media realignment, with a large number of people leaving ex-Twitter over Elon Musk’s support of Donald Trump and the changes he’s made to the way that platform works. The Twitter alternative Bluesky has gained at least a million users over the last week or so, possibly plural millions, and enough people in my circles have deleted their Twitter accounts that I’ve decided to put a bit of effort into increasing my own level of activity at Bluesky. Which means yet another (partial) transition from one social-media service to another.

The main thing this is making clear to me is just how much effort, integrated over a decade-plus, I have put into curating my ex-Twitter experience. Unlike a lot of other people, I don’t find my feeds overrun with objectionable crap, but that’s the result of a lot of work— aggressively muting and blocking people who annoy me, word-muting a long list of terms that tend to be associated with topics that annoy me, and so on. The thought of reconstructing all that on Bluesky is pretty daunting, especially since it doesn’t have quite the same set of curation tools so I need to find work-arounds for some of the things I’ve been doing.

This transitional period also has me reflecting on the life cycle of these platforms, because having gone through a bunch of these, they have recognizable phases: there’s an initial burst of growth and excitement, a sort of plateau of professionalization, and then some fragmentation and disappointment. I’ve seen it on Usenet, through at least two waves of blogging (depending on whether you count Substack as a variant of blogging or a new thing), and almost the entire histories of Facebook and ex-Twitter, and now we’re going through it with Bluesky.

Specifically, Bluesky is currently deep in the “Self-Congratulatory Horseshit” sub-phase of the initial expansion. This is the part where early(-ish) adopters spend a lot of time and energy talking about how special they are— smarter, friendlier, cooler, sexier— than users of whatever platform they’re leaving behind. The New Place is better than the Old in every way— running more smoothly, generating better content, offering better support— and everyone who’s made the move is lucky to be living in such an age of miracles and wonders.

This is an inevitable step in such a platform transition. It’s also pretty much all horseshit. Most of the positive aspects of the New Place are just a function of scale— everything seems friendlier and more congenial because everything is small. The New Place is populated by early adopters, who tend to have a similar outlook, so in the early days everything feels great because everybody is, if not on the same page, at least reading from the same chapter of the same book.

That feeling will just as inevitably fade as the population swells, and begins to include people who aren’t coming to it with the same mindset as the early adopters. The first wave of blogging was full of excitement about how this was a true revolution in media, the old ways were being swept away, etc. And within a handful of years, a lot of the Big Names from those early days had parlayed their new-media revolution into comfortable jobs within the traditional media structure, and the new blogs that were starting up were by people who were explicitly hoping to parlay them into media careers. The early days of Twitter felt thrilling because they were shattering barriers— you could tweet at celebrities and they would actually engage with you!— but within a few years everything got locked in and formalized. Nowadays if you tweet at a celebrity, most of the time you’re talking to an intern on their publicity team. And so on.

This is not to say that these revolutionary moments were completely without impact— the golden age of blogging created some new media niches, Twitter made new categories of celebrities, etc.— but that early energy petered out in a wave of professionalization. New kinds of platforms generate new kinds of opportunities, but they’re rarely as transformative as the early self-congratulatory horseshit makes it seem.

Bluesky is as deep in the Self-Congratulatory Horseshit phase as I’ve seen in quite a few years— I’m pretty sure that posts talking about how great the site is make up a double-digit percentage of my feed. The phase shift is coming, though— I’ve already seen a few official feeds for professional politicians pop up (and blocked a few of them), and also the first complaints about official feeds appearing. If the growth continues, the Brands won’t be far behind, and then it’s just (ex-) Twitter with a different iconography.

I realize this sounds horribly jaded, because it is. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve worn the T-shirt enough that it’s dropped into the workout clothes rotation because it’s a little too ratty to wear in the office. (When you’re picturing that, do keep in mind that I’m a tenured professor of physics…) I wish I could muster the enthusiasm for this transition that I see from others, but I just can’t. At this point, I just hope that the inevitable disappointment and fragmentation phase doesn’t come too quickly or get too ugly.

So, you know, we’ll see how it goes. I have no immediate plans to leave ex-Twitter at the moment, because a lot of the content I most enjoy there is resolutely apolitical and thus not highly motivated to move. If that changes, I may shift over more fully, but it’ll likely be an adiabatic thing (in the AMO physics sense of the term) where I just gradually end up posting and reading Bluesky and only occasionally interacting with ex-Twitter. Or maybe a few years from now we’ll be doing this whole tedious dance again with yet another platform.

That was grumpy, so here, have a peppy song that I accidentally earwormed myself with a few paragraphs back:

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So, yeah, I’m old and yelling at clouds. If you enjoy this for some reason, here’s a button:

And if you want to reminisce about the glory days of platforms past, the comments will be open: