My engagement with the new IZZZZI “social network” is still sparking joy. A lot of the stuff I write there could be considered as “micro-blogging”, with a slight journal tinge. The fact that it’s deleted after one day only makes it a bit more ephemeral.
I’m also doing a bit more blogging than last year, where it was mostly week notes–not sure whether those actually trained me to write a bit more or held me back, because I knew that I was doing one post per week, no need to do anything above that call of duty (for the attending RPG nerds, I just started a post series about “old school” GURPS gaming)
IZZZZI has a built-in delay between posting, reading and responding. If I write something today, everyone will see it “tomorrow” (French local time, if I remember correctly), and when they respond there, I’ll see their responses the next day. So a two day delay between posting and getting feedback.
Blogging isn’t all that different. I write something, and it gets published immediately. But the consumption patterns are different, if they subscribe t a RSS feed, readers might get this every 30 minutes or maybe the next day if they have dedicated feed reading times. Responses can vary from low-delay comments, to posts on news accumulators, to blog posts of their own. Comments seem to be getting rarer, and personal emails to the author require a different kind of attitude than one might exhibit–it’s easier to be angry in public in a “general direction”, than writing someone directly, privately.
Way back in the 90s, I didn’t have constant internet access (calm yourself, Gen Z readers). Heck, for a while I didn’t have internet at all, but dialled into a local computer where I picked up my daily batch of email/discussions–the “FidoNet”. And if I dialled in two hours later, I still wouldn’t have gotten new emails, because the other side only connected to other systems at night, when it was cheaper.
Yes, there were aggressive comments, but much more opportunities to cool down in-between.
But that’s not even my main point here.
Scrolls of doom and hoses of fire #
Whenever I read a twitter clone these days (which includes Mastodon and BlueSky), I get a lot of messages at once. Both by total post volume, but also by the nature of post length and screen resolution. Your average 2025 display, even a mobile one, cat fit a lot of people’s short messages. Blog posts and email messages generally take up the whole application window, so while there’s more room to express your rage, it still just appears to be one angry person at a time.
Chewing slowly helps with digestion.
Is this tone policing? Am I telling people that they can’t express their heartfelt and valid emotions in a certain way. I hope not. I’m trying to explain–to myself and others–my own emotional response.
There’s often a “fight, flight or join” instinct coming up when I’m immersed in these kinds of discussions:
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If I’m coming out of a more calm space, I might have the (often illusionary) idea that I’m in a more rational mindset and thus can propose compromises are state counter-arguments. In other words: Become a reply-guy, trying to establish a two-way discussion where the other party isn’t interested in this.
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I also might just want to get away from it all. Go to another site, temporarily mute or even block users.
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And of course it’s only natural to get angry, too.
I don’t really want to do any of that.
Side note: This is CNN #
By the way, this isn’t just an issue with the interwebs. A few decades ago, news–and thus the sparks that ignited rage–were rather rare. A daily newspaper. The evening news on TV.
Then the 24 hours news cycle was invented. Emotion sells, and sadly there are more stories that could incite rage on this earth than cute puppies. Social media just accelerated this.
How to escape? #
I honestly don’t have a good idea how to escape this for a lot of sites. Granted, Twitter in the past and now BlueSky is a read-only medium, mostly (no commercial or other agenda on there, not enough followers or people interested in hash tags to get good comments).
So I can just strip that out of my consumption. Done. Deleted Bluesky App, logged out of web page, try to avoid it.
Mastodon is better, but there’s still a lot going on. Maybe add some filters.
But coming back to the post title: What if I fix the immediacy for me? That can be built into the platform, but maybe I can change my interaction patterns to be better.
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Exit after write. If I post something on Mastodon or elsewhere, don’t wait for the response to come in. Don’t check too early. It’s rarely that I have a discussion where there’s a lot of back-and-forth, so my responses in turn aren’t needed or can wait.
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Schedule times for consumption. This is against the immediacy of desire. Checking too often doesn’t allow for the room of building up resistances. There might be even more angry posts in one sitting, but at least I’m prepared for it, and don’t get the death of a thousand cuts.
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Find alternatives to do. There’s a lot of procrastination involved here, where you immediately want to do something different. Now quite often anything different will do, it’s just that the social media streams are easy to reach and don’t require a lot of effort, the length of the diversion seems more granular (cf. watching half a season of a TV series because you don’t feel you have the time and patience for a 105 minute movie).
I’ll keep in touch whether any of this worked.