By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Bird Song of the Day
Northern Mockingbird, 350 South Madison Avenue, Pasadena, Los Angeles, California, United States. With droning airplane.
Patient readers, I am in the process of wrestling the latest HICPAC meeting into submission; disappointingly but unsurprisingly, they plan to stick with their baggy blues. So this is an open thread. However, let me describe my recent experience with social media–
On Twitter (“X”), I forgot the cardinal rule that the moderators (or the moderating algorithms) don’t understand hyperbole, especially when it involves violent rhetoric, and got banned until I removed the offending, hyperbolic post. When I went to do that, I got caught up in an endless captcha look — VPN? Cookies? — and got really banned for trying the captcha too many times (appearing to Twitter’s version of Skynet, no doubt, like a bot).
So I thought I would try BlueSky (as opposed to Threads, which is The Zuckerberg™, ick, no). As readers may know, there’s a good deal of triumphalism from liberal Democrats about leaving Twitter and moving to BlueSky, which they hope will cause Twitter’s demise (a little premature, given that BlueSky’s global user base is — to the extent the numbers are any good at all — 20 million, while Twitter’s is 611 million).
So I created a Blue Sky account, whereupon BlueSky presented me with a timeline, and asked me to “like” seven posts, to train their algorithm (there is indeed a second timeline for posts only from accounts I followed, but I hadn’t followed any yet).
The first poster on their timeline: AOC.
I scroll down a little: Taylor Swift.
Oh.
Sky, eh?
Anyhow, I went through the process, and actually found some accounts I could follow (e.g., Trisha Greenhalgh), so I wasn’t off social media entirely. (I also have a Mastodon account, but at least on the reader I use, the threading is just impossible, so it’s hard to use.)
In a week, Twitter decided my captcha count was below the bot threshold, and so I logged in, and, chastened, removed the offending post.
And I must say, I’m glad to be back; I have some quiet little neighborhoods on Twitter I couldn’t rebuild anywhere else. Moreover, if you’re a professional doomscroller, as I suppose I am, Twitter is the far superior platform (not that platforms are good, they’re bad). Twitter is a firehose; BlueSky is a garden hose. The “hellsite,” as its users fondly call it, is like a world city, like Manhattan; BlueSky is like a provincial town (and I don’t mean like an “under-rated destination”). Even if Twitter is owned and run by a ranting thirteen-year-old tech boy billionaire hopped up on whatever it is he’s hopped up on. Of course, if you want your mellow unharshed, BlueSky is the place to be.
Adding, when BlueSky numbers level off, as they will, we will have a good-ish proxy for the actual size of the TDS-afflicted population; a million so far. An interesting result! (I predict that, once again, the PMC will find that they simply lack the class power to achieve their political goals.)
Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi, lichen, and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From Wukchumni:
Wukchumni writes: “Sierra mushrooms.”
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