I come to you again tonight with a nugget from a podcast. This time, it’s a line from the recent episode of “Decoder with Nilay Patel.” It was a broadcast of a live discussion between Patel and Chokepoint Capitalism co-authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin. If you’re interested in the cross-section of creative work and capitalism, the entire chat is worth your time. But Patel said something towards the end of their discussion that leads me to tonight’s post:
“There’s a difference between having an audience and having an algorithmic audience.”
Last weekend, we watched “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.” It’s based on characters created by Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer Camp in the Marcel the Shell books that we read to our daughter when she was little. The movie is a sweet look at Marcel’s search for his family after a marriage breaks up. That search leads to him creating a YouTube channel to talk about the search. I won’t give away much more about the plot, but Patel’s quote reminded me of a line from the movie that I jotted down in my notebook when Marcel was talking about the people watching his video uploads:
“It’s an audience, not a community.”
Both of these quotes are so important to the work I used to do. And both the nuance and the differences between an audience, whether algorithmic or not, and a community seem to be important all over again as we get word that Twitter is moving toward an all-algorithmic timeline. I won’t get into the ins and outs of what we prototyped and what we learned while I was there, but trust me when I say that I was very vocal about the design and product decisions when we were testing a purely algorithmic timeline for people.
Which brings me to the nut of tonight’s reason for all this exposition: If we can trust people to build an algorithm, we should be able to trust them to curate a timeline. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s get into it.
Years ago, while working with my friend Scott, the social web was just taking shape, and the cost of building an app was falling precipitously. We would often think about mashing up different existing app ideas to create a new one. One of my favorites was what we ended up calling Looksy. It was basically a way that you could share links with your friends to items you had seen around the web that were interesting to you, asking them to “give ‘em a Looksy.” This was back in 2008, when sites like StumbleUpon and Digg as well as RSS feeds were a lot more ubiquitous, and useful, than the walled gardens we have today. But core to our idea was that people, friends even, were trusted link sources for their other friends. That human curation, and the ability to target specific links to specific people, was an essential piece of the experience we wanted to create.
Later, services like Nuzzle (whose parent company, Scroll, was bought by Twitter bought about a year before Jack Dorsey stepped down), started to fill the space we were looking to fill with Looksy, but it was more of a heat map of popularly shared links from the sources you had already trusted, whether from your Facebook friends or accounts you were following on Twitter. It was a great way for me to keep up with what the people I was interested in were interested in. Which was always one of the biggest attractions of Twitter to me. It was like I had self-selected a couple of dozen editors-in-chief for the most interesting publication on the web each and every day.
This curation concept was also one of the big reasons I always admired the Curation team at Twitter. They were constantly gathering and vetting and explaining the links and information and trending topics on the service. The Explore tab on Twitter became the fastest, and usually best-sourced, breaking news service on the planet. Without argument. I miss it every day. Especially when I need a quick update on something I’m not totally interested in. Need to know the score of a game you’re not watching, the Curation team had you covered with not just the scores but a few Tweet-length highlights so you could get the gist of any match. Natural disasters? The Curation team had the latest, accurate information from trusted sources served up at the top of your feed. And for the all-too-often breaking news of a terrorist attack or mass shooting? Unfortunately, the Curation team had a lot of practice, and brought their humanity and care into crafting updates with the right balance of information and empathy.
I started my writing career as a news producer for Florida Public Radio. Drafting and editing scripts with our reporters was one of my favorite tasks. But it was tough going more often than not. So, when I see people who get it right, over and over, I have to stop and admire them. It may be why I miss that part of Twitter most of all. Because I know how much work it was. And what a talent it is to do it well. As we lose one more space where careful curation is being replaced by an algorithm which rewards engagement over curiosity, I am lamenting Twitter’s loss all over again.
Never the Machine Forever
10 January 2023
Moving stories.
I come to you again tonight with a nugget from a podcast. This time, it’s a line from the recent episode of “Decoder with Nilay Patel.” It was a broadcast of a live discussion between Patel and Chokepoint Capitalism co-authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin. If you’re interested in the cross-section of creative work and capitalism, the entire chat is worth your time. But Patel said something towards the end of their discussion that leads me to tonight’s post:
“There’s a difference between having an audience and having an algorithmic audience.”
Last weekend, we watched “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.” It’s based on characters created by Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer Camp in the Marcel the Shell books that we read to our daughter when she was little. The movie is a sweet look at Marcel’s search for his family after a marriage breaks up. That search leads to him creating a YouTube channel to talk about the search. I won’t give away much more about the plot, but Patel’s quote reminded me of a line from the movie that I jotted down in my notebook when Marcel was talking about the people watching his video uploads:
“It’s an audience, not a community.”
Both of these quotes are so important to the work I used to do. And both the nuance and the differences between an audience, whether algorithmic or not, and a community seem to be important all over again as we get word that Twitter is moving toward an all-algorithmic timeline. I won’t get into the ins and outs of what we prototyped and what we learned while I was there, but trust me when I say that I was very vocal about the design and product decisions when we were testing a purely algorithmic timeline for people.
Which brings me to the nut of tonight’s reason for all this exposition: If we can trust people to build an algorithm, we should be able to trust them to curate a timeline. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s get into it.
Years ago, while working with my friend Scott, the social web was just taking shape, and the cost of building an app was falling precipitously. We would often think about mashing up different existing app ideas to create a new one. One of my favorites was what we ended up calling Looksy. It was basically a way that you could share links with your friends to items you had seen around the web that were interesting to you, asking them to “give ‘em a Looksy.” This was back in 2008, when sites like StumbleUpon and Digg as well as RSS feeds were a lot more ubiquitous, and useful, than the walled gardens we have today. But core to our idea was that people, friends even, were trusted link sources for their other friends. That human curation, and the ability to target specific links to specific people, was an essential piece of the experience we wanted to create.
Later, services like Nuzzle (whose parent company, Scroll, was bought by Twitter bought about a year before Jack Dorsey stepped down), started to fill the space we were looking to fill with Looksy, but it was more of a heat map of popularly shared links from the sources you had already trusted, whether from your Facebook friends or accounts you were following on Twitter. It was a great way for me to keep up with what the people I was interested in were interested in. Which was always one of the biggest attractions of Twitter to me. It was like I had self-selected a couple of dozen editors-in-chief for the most interesting publication on the web each and every day.
This curation concept was also one of the big reasons I always admired the Curation team at Twitter. They were constantly gathering and vetting and explaining the links and information and trending topics on the service. The Explore tab on Twitter became the fastest, and usually best-sourced, breaking news service on the planet. Without argument. I miss it every day. Especially when I need a quick update on something I’m not totally interested in. Need to know the score of a game you’re not watching, the Curation team had you covered with not just the scores but a few Tweet-length highlights so you could get the gist of any match. Natural disasters? The Curation team had the latest, accurate information from trusted sources served up at the top of your feed. And for the all-too-often breaking news of a terrorist attack or mass shooting? Unfortunately, the Curation team had a lot of practice, and brought their humanity and care into crafting updates with the right balance of information and empathy.
I started my writing career as a news producer for Florida Public Radio. Drafting and editing scripts with our reporters was one of my favorite tasks. But it was tough going more often than not. So, when I see people who get it right, over and over, I have to stop and admire them. It may be why I miss that part of Twitter most of all. Because I know how much work it was. And what a talent it is to do it well. As we lose one more space where careful curation is being replaced by an algorithm which rewards engagement over curiosity, I am lamenting Twitter’s loss all over again.
See you tomorrow?