This is how social media failed

I. Sometime in 2006, Christos Ballas, a respected psychiatry clinician / academic at Penn Uni started a blog. His blog sucked in every conceivable way, except for oneⁱ. That one happens to be exactly what I was pontificating @romanians, in 2012 :

Not everything I want [for the new year] is negative. For instance, I want a blog by an airline pilot. But written like this one, you understand me, no derpage and aspirationage, no empty pretense and dumbass "in" jokes.ⁱⁱ Because blogs aren't there as an outlet of our inferiority complexes and xenophobiaⁱⁱⁱ in full battle gear. Blogs are there to allow the curious to live our interesting [intellectual] lives vicariously, for five minutes at a stretch, with minimal cost.

So, not another "young adult" blog, thanks, I piss on the whole fucktarded young adult lot of you. You're not to talk and there isn't what you could talk about, you banal cumstains you. There's no need for yet another "dumbass raising children" blog, there's no need for a "look what I found^iv in the supermarket" blog, there's no need for yet another "Internet expert", "marketeer", PR cunt and other he-bores and she-bores, he-idiots and she-idiots, further exercises in trivial banality that make bananas hurt. You plain and simple don't interest, anyone, ever, it's not possible, just die painfully but quietly already, the world's chock full of supernumerary nothings.

An airplane pilot's blog. A tiger trainers' blog. A glue sniffer's blog. A White House callgirl blog.^v A something blog, dude, anything as long as it's identifiable and concrete, as long as it's more than herp derp what my day was like going to the post office, what the parking meter said, what I think about the news and the rest of the shit, stale already roughly before the Iron Age. It's an Internet not a roll of toilet paper, show a modicum of respect ye last week's crop of literates.

As you can see, my tone in English is actually a lot friendlier than it used to be in Romanian, by and large. This is because there's a lot more of you now, and you might come and beat me up. But let's move on.

I. Sometime in 2007, social media discovered this blog. That's a year late, which is the first but not the largest problem. The largest problem is self-reported :

145000 unique visitors may not seem like a lot to those in the porn industry, but it's a lot for me, and especially for a "throwaway post" like the one on Halloween.

Getting on Digg and the front page of reddit certainly is the cause of this, but not the explanation. The post got over 200 comments, not counting what my spam filter destroyed; more importantly, the post went to places like metafilter, where it had over 170 comments-- more than any other post that week.

Why?

Because they're dumb. Seriously, what social media exploded over was that this guy went to a cinema, to see a horror movie, and saw a stroller, and said the people associated with it were white and fat. Ie, rednecks.

And the fat retarded rednecks that make up the infrequentable section of the Internet, those 99% of visits/clicks/whatever that yield no value/importance/utility collectively lost it, because oh mah gerbil, this is what interests them. By virtue of it being what they can represent with their limited cognition, this is what interests them. When's the last time you saw a dog sitting quietly with a book ?

So let's fucking debate whether it matters that stupid people are generally fat, and let's pretend we're unware that most stupid people will necessarily be white for simple statistical reasons : people of other colors don't live in circumstances complex enough to allow meaningful difference between the stupid and the smart. Just so the 99% can pretend to itself like it "participated" to the "conversation".

Meanwhile, and this is the third problem, meanwhile social media lost even that numeric power. Back in 2007 when digg was the thing spikes measured in 150k "uniques" whatever thay may mean (generally, it means mouthbreathers), but by 2014 reddit has serious trouble sending a fraction of that.^vi

Summa : Social Media failed by being late to the party. Sure, they claim to be quick. This is exactly like the claims to chastity of Jimmy Swaggart clones - there to disguise a contrary reality. Otherwise, finding out about things years late means you get to be one of those guys that get to seethe at how I'm Bitcoin rich.

Social Media failed by being, like any mass movement, a mass movement. There's really no further need to explain why anything that has mass involvement will fail, or to quote FOCA, "Booon... o sa iasa un dezastru"^vii.

And in the third, and final, and most painful phase... Social Media failed by not even being able to deliver the numbers anymore.

That's it. It's done, it's buried, forget about it.

Notice that blogs are still here.

1. "How do you make footnotes on movabletype", he wants to know. Because yeah, he was on movabletype, the blogspot of 2005 - but notice that footnotes are in fact an absolute requirement for a working brain expressing itself. That they're one of the exactly two plugins I use here is perhaps coincidental. [↩]
2. If you think that entire "gender issues" in "media" is anything more than a gang of about a hundred or so unemployable Leah McGrath Goodman clones that are trying to pay their mortgage by circlejerking while the publishers look the other way - because you're stupid and they're cheap - you're very very new to this world and could I perhaps interest you in my Rikers Island auction ? [↩]
3. "Fear of the other", for the record. [↩]
4. Seriously, you FOUND it ? Well done, don't breathe with your mouth open. You realise that - don't breathe with your mouth open! - someone designed it, someone else made it, someone shipped it and a don't breathe with your mouth open just like yourself stocked in the shelf for you to find it while not breathing at all, and then take it to the checkout where another dude will try to bag it while holding mouth closed at the same time.

   Go find a slippery ledge off the Silver Cock why don't you. [↩]

5. Seriously, you think WH call girls don't exist ? What, that Tiger golfer dude is the only cvasi-black fucker in America that does blow off "dancer" crack while the wife's tied up in the closet, beaten black and blue ? Spare me.

   Or come to thing about it... don't spare me. Instead, let me tell you about the deal of the century : I'm auctioning off Riker's Island, with Preet Bharara in a package. Best bid gets it. It even has an unlisted bridge going to it! [↩]

6. The same dynamic significantly reduces the value of Google searches :

   Moreover, of all the people interested in one particular topic, or niche, or segment, a vast majority already have a hierarchical structure of sources in their head. If you wish to hear the Republican talking points on the shutdown you don't go to google and type "please show me some representative Republican sites". You already know where to look, which incidentally makes Google significantly less useful in aggregate : sure it can send some visits, but the users it sends aren't representative of the Internet population. They're a selected group, and they're selected for cluelessness. Who would want to pay to be visited by more clueless people ? Some some sort of scammer, perhaps, like a patent toy vendor or something - unless you're selling cheap goods for massive mark-ups, google advertising makes absolutely no sense for you.

   [↩]

7. Maybe just say "Occupy" to you, then point and laugh ? [↩]