Hi and welcome, David. I personally bailed on USENET more than ten years ago because there was a prevailing attitude on all USENET newsgroups (to varying degrees) that was cliquish and unfriendly to newcomers. Even when I wasn’t a newcomer to a particular group (and I mostly wasn’t since I’d been doing it throughout the 90s) this culture just turned me right off and would diminish my respect for key ‘alpha’ individuals in the group. By contrast, the more I experienced the budding collection of web fora around the turn of the century, the more I realised that things did not have to be that way, and that much more mutually supportive and mutually interested communities had developed elsewhere. It was a general decision, not specific to IF (r.a.i-f was far from the worst offender in this regard) — one day I just witnessed a particularly odious drubbing of a well-meaning noob, and just decided that I didn’t need to be around for all the exercises in hardcore posturing, anymore.
Moderation might be the key to all this. Creating a moderated newsgroup was pretty awkward and not very popular in that culture, whereas web fora are easily moderated and it is just expected that they will be. Or maybe it’s just that online culture is evolving, and that evolution happens faster in brand new hangouts (which resemble the aftermath of an extinction event) than it does in the old.
Thinking about the effect of ‘extinction event conditions’ on the pace of innovation in online community-building is very interesting actually, especially as you shift into analysing microblogging platforms. I’m digressing here, and I could go on for pages about this, so I’ll wrap it up: the upshot is, beware of letting the instinct to preserve a vested interest, render you overly skeptical of the new ways. Even this forum itself is actually very old social tech. This is my only web forum; I quit all the others before this one even started. At this point in history, we should all be fully interconnected on Twitter, et. al. Maybe we will be there by 2020?
Paul.
P.S. Thanks for maintaining Frotz! And that is pretty cool about Shadowgate and Uninvited. I played the Apple IIgs versions.
I can accept though that the [enforced] brevity is not for everyone. Also, it is not ideal to have all that power concentrated in a single company. I am pretty interested in Diaspora (a federated system like email) as an alternative for longer-form posts, but I’ve been using it for many months and just got turned off by all the glitches: it’s definitely not ready for primetime yet. I don’t go back there very much at present, but I am keeping an eye on its progress.
Someone said something to me about Twitter recently that explained it a little bit: He said it was a good source of information about the Occupy movement. It occurred to me then that Twitter is often more useful as means of one-way communication. Other social sites, with the ability to comment on just about everything, offer more opportunities for two-way communication, which is good when you’re connecting with friends. But Twitter is often a better source of links to articles and photos. For that you don’t so much want a friend as a good curator. So it makes sense to follow strangers on Twitter, as long as they share your taste. And you can use retweet to expand the content you provide to those following you.
One of my problems with Twitter in the past was that there was not enough preview information for me to know which links I want to follow. That seems to be changing somewhat on Twitter’s web interface, but my impression is that 3rd-party Twitter apps have always been better at that sort of thing.
Another problem I’ve had with Twitter is that some users put out WAY more content than others, which essentially blocks infrequent posters from ever being seen. Much as the “filter bubble” effect of Facebook has been bashed, it’s nice to have some sorting and filtering options that take you to what you want to see. Perhaps this is another situation that’s better with 3rd-party apps - I don’t know because I don’t use them.
Yep. It’s the best way I know to share a link and add a bit of commentary so people know what I think of it. Anything more is gravy (but there is a lot more – I have made some really great friendships through Twitter).
Organising the people you follow into private lists is the solution to this. Put all the less frequent posters you don’t want to miss on their own list together. Some clients, though, do not support lists very well, and the website interface is reportedly changing now so that lists are one extra click away or something, which is unfortunate, but doesn’t matter if you can find a good client.
Speaking as one who loves the brevity (and all brevity, enforced or otherwise) I still don’t get Twitter. But I don’t get blogs, and Twitter is kind of like very tiny blogs, so it’s a tiny example of a larger thing I already fail to get.
A fair number of people seem to have this opinion (more about Twitter than about blogs, but you do see both). I’m on the opposite side: I have a hard time wrapping my head around your opinion because I don’t get what is so pointless about typing things at other people under a blog post or on a Twitter stream, that is not equally pointless about typing things at other people under a forum thread heading or in a USENET thread. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but I can’t imagine how any of these could be differentiated in terms of having a point, because they all have the same point, which is the public sharing of information with a self-selected group of cohorts. No?
I think it’s sort of the one-way vs. two-way issue again. Even when a blog allows comments, it’s still one-way in that only one person can start the conversation… and often the comments are so numerous and the signal-to-noise ratio is so low that it’s not worth reading them anyway. I read a lot of blog articles, but I don’t follow any blogs.
I’ve thought about blogging from time to time, but I think I just don’t have enough to say. Sure, I rant plenty, but do people really want to hear that? Do I even really want them to hear it myself? I used to share links whenever I got fired up about them, but I’ve transitioned to filing them away on delicious instead. That way I can save them for a time when someone might actually want to hear about them. The internet has streams, and it has references, and a lot of making it work for me has been about figuring out which is which, and how to handle each.
Well, I can’t speak to anyone else’s tastes, but for me the reason is (I suspect) mostly about sharing thoughts vs. sharing works. I’m interested in works: games, stories, articles, movies, recipes, videos, songs … but only very very selectively interested in thoughts/notions/ideas/opinions. And not selective in a “I want to know this person’s thoughts” way, but rather “I want to know nearly 0.00000021001 percent of this person’s thoughts, because he’s awesomely fascinating and only utterly dull the rest of the time.”
Blogs have matured to the point where some (many) of them are genuine works, though often works-in-progress (and I’d rather just wait 'til the end and buy the book), but tweets seem pretty restricted to being thoughts/notions/ideas/opinions (or a hyperlink to something which isn’t a tweet) and there’s basically no person on Earth for whom it’s true that I’m (A) consistently interested in their thoughts/etc and yet (B) not already snuggling/sleeping/making out with them anyway (in which case I don’t need to follow them on Twitter to hear what’s up).
So I think that’s why I don’t get Twitter (and, to a lesser extent, why I don’t get blogs, although with blogs it’s partly a lingering thing from the days when blogs were seldom works, and more often just thoughts/opinions/the cat is sick/I want to buy this hat/oh my I seem to have literally bored you to death sorry about that/oh the cat’s thrown up again/I like soup.
I get it a little better now because I see how you are connecting the dots between relevance and social organisation. I don’t connect the dots the same way.
There is a LOT of time ‘wasted’ scrolling past large blocks of things here I don’t necessarily want to read. I can’t even really avoid this by going by topic headings (e.g. look at the topic heading on this thread). Plus, all of the surrounding cruft in a forum like this is not really necessary and greatly increasing the ‘eyeball cost’ of scrolling (that’s the main sense in which web forums feel palpably archaic — look at all of the wasted space and mostly unnecessary info and widgets on this page: plus, every time I try to post something, there are 24 smiley GIFs constantly being animated on the left side of the screen – on my netbook this slows everything to a crawl). The current crop of web forums are just way too complex for the task at hand. They waste more of it on TRUE irrelevancies: time not spent reading what another human being wrote. It is also very difficult to filter based on personality here. If a user is very obnoxious on a web forum but somehow manages to stay on the right side of the ‘getting banned’ line (it’s an art I guess), I can put them on ignore but let’s face it: the conversations are so intertwined here that it will impossible to truly ignore that person’s contributions. So a web forum is in a sense a prisoner of the personalities that it attracts: it has a tendency to calcify. Additionally, I have gotten sucked into debates in web forums and abyssal forever-threads that wander far afield but which I find it difficult to extract myself from either because it’s too funny, or the guy debating me is being a bit assholish and imputing negative motives to my opinion that I feel the need to correct: two situations in which I tend to get trapped in a forum thread like a fly on stickytape.
Empirically I know that I tend to waste an order of magnitude more time-I-wish-I-could-back on a web forum than on a social network or microblogging services. So how do I manage microblogging to get the best signal-to-noise?
First, give up the idea of one topic per person. You like multiple topics, right? You are not a one-note beast: no one is. So why must all of your online connections with other people be one-note connections? Interests tend to cluster. So I reward people who post highly interesting stuff, by following them and then further by putting them on my most frequently-read lists. If they post too much irrelevant-to-me stuff I will downgrade them to a less frequent list if I find there is still some value there, or I will just unfollow them if I don’t see any value. I DO NOT trade influence, i.e. I do not follow other people simply because they follow me: not as a rule. And I have to do this kind of curation less than you might think, because the opportunity cost of reading an irrelevant tweet is very, very low compared to reading an irrelevant forum post. But Twitter, properly culled and curated, turns into a teeming hive of relevance-to-my-interests: it’s really quite remarkable how valuable to me it’s become. And I am a person who is extremely impatient with small talk and idle chit-chat. I just don’t do it; I aim all my commentary at a topic I feel strongly about ALL OF iT. And that’s mostly all I read on Twitter. Just remember: you do not have to follow anyone even if they’re nice to you, and you do not have to read everything from everyone.
I am making kind of a long, messy argument. It’s like 5am here; I am groggy. But I really think that if you feel Twitter is a hive of irrelevance, the blame is on you for not putting any effort into curating your feed. The responsibility is on you to choose what’s relevant: it’s like making a highly customised forum.
Paul.
P.S. Arguments above apply less so to macroblogging, but then most full blogs are focused on a single topic anyway, unlike most Twitter accounts.
I’ve adopted a new curation strategy of adding a whole bunch of new feeds at once and then unfollowing each one as it begins to annoy me. We’ll see how that goes…
Sorry to interupt your social media debate, figured I should “introduce myself” before I post anywheres as that seems like the considerate thing to do.
Letsee, as way of introduction, I should mention that my family is made up of story tellers and professional clowns, so any of my creativity is thanks to them. I’m fluent in German, although maybe not, in the sense that while I read it nearly every day, I haven’t spoken it in a looong time. Returning to college after a 3 or 4 year haitus. Makes me feel old. I’m not old. I should really write more than I actually do. This current obsession with making a text game is probably mostly just procrastinating on that.
I have memories of attempting to learn how to make text games when I was a young 'un. I gave up. Surprise, surprise. I’m sure if I had the attention span, I could learn all the syntax stuff needed that goes into coding things, but I don’t like the time it takes between having a great idea and learning how to implement it. That kills any ambition I have to get something done.
I think the only reason I’ve enjoyed it now, is because wrestling with inform7 is pretty much the same process one goes through while playing a text game. Everything is awesome and fun and then you get stuck. You know what you want to happen, but nothing you try (or code) works. After trying everything you can think of (over and over and over again), it’s hints or a walkthrough (or the inform manual) that save you. In return, you get a small bit of heady success that keeps you from giving up. Then you move on and find something else to get stuck on.
Unfortunately after experimenting with putting this current short story into a game form, I’m hooked, and I’m determined to see it through. Getting to the stage where I might actually run into some problems. I’m not sure how to implement what I have in mind, but I think it involves tables. Lots and lots of tables. Sooo, you might hear from me again.
Hello. Introducing myself when I have already posted to this forum is a little anxiety-inducing, but I figure that in the age of IF with few unwinnable states, you gentle folks will not come down on me too hard if my events are out of sequence.
I am a 33-year-old activist and educator who is interested in all manner of gaming and gaming-related media (one of my favorite web sites is The Hathor Legacy). My introduction to text adventures came in the 80s, when I first played a game called Twin Kingdom Valley on the Commodore 64. I found it impossible to progress far, but I loved the sense of freedom I had while playing it. When I got my first PC in 1995, I decided to code a text adventure of my own, but QBasic’s file size limitations prevented me from completing it. (Perhaps it is just as well, considering that it was a disjointed madcap adventure typical of first contributions to the genre.)
For some time now I have been learning TADS 3. Though I feel that I have learned all the fundamentals of the language, I have yet to complete a work of IF, mostly due to prolonged writer’s block. So for now I am contenting myself reading and occasionally contributing to the discussion here. If you have any suggestions on how to see an IF production to the end, please send them my way.
Start with something really, really small/short, make it finishable, polish it up, and make sure it’s still finishable after all the polishing. A mini-comp or speed-IF might be a good place to release a first effort. The constrained themes and tight deadlines of such things might help you get past your writer’s block, and expectations are typically low-- especially for speed IFs-- so if your first effort is a train-wreck it’s no big deal.
Since you are a TADS 3 person, you could try writing a room for the Lime/Coconut contest.
Or you could write something for the upcoming New Year’s Speed IF.
Enh, don’t worry… it has collapsed into a dribble of non sequiturs.
Welcome to the board.
Good observation. Feel free to ask any kind of question.
LOL! Welcome also, Morana.
If you see it to the end, in future years you will start it up and replay it, think about what you did right and what you did wrong. If you let the project lie fallow for too long without pushing toward completion, you will lose the threads of it and probably never look at or re-experience that work again in a way that you can learn from it. That’s probably the best motivation for finishing things that I’ve found.
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