Easton Greenhouse in the Uk, Creative Commons Source: Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
Since 2017, the blogging platform Substack has been running the playbook “borrow lots of money, and spend it to pay people to post on your site, causing it to grow and your site to seem big and important.” The web boom of the 2000s was funded by Google which needed to give people reasons to make Google searches, see Google ads, and be surveilled by Google Analytics. In 2021 Substack spent $3 in advances to bloggers for every $1 they earned from those blogs. In the past this has always ended in tears, and the people who run and fund the site have shady ideas and ugly politics. You can find many people talking about specific Substack bloggers, their ideas, and whether Substack should host them.1 Not as many people talk about how the site as a whole is weird in a way which feels normal to wealthy and influential people in New York City and Southern California.
I’m told that Ancient World Twitter was a thing and many of the same people have moved to Bluesky. I am an open web person not a corporate social media person, but if you prefer following this site on Bluesky to following it on RSS or by email or by checking the URL every few days, there is a way. For a few months, it has been possible to follow bookandswordblog at https://bsky.app/profile/bookandswordblog.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy
academia.edu has introduced new terms of service allowing them to use your Member Content and your personal information, including your name, voice, signature (!), photograph, and likeness, for any purpose forever. That is clearly a proposal to let them generate fake podcasts or videos of you talking about your work, powered by bullshit generators. To delete your account next time you log in, click “privacy policy” not “accept terms of service,” then put your mouse over your username in the upper right, then click “account settings” and look for the option to delete.
Sjoerd Levelt https://scholar.social/@slevelt@hcommons.social thinks that the symbol of the clash between birdsite and Mastodon should be the clash between the elephant and the dragon in ancient philosophers and medieval bestiaries
In November 2022 many academics have created accounts on Mastodon, a federated microblogging service. Mastodon is decentralized like the old forums and mailing lists, but you can easily cross-post from one Mastodon server to another and search across servers with hashtags to find posts of common interest. Because each instance is moderated by members, it can set its own standard for acceptable behaviour rather than trying to get Germans and Americans to agree whether the Horst-Wesel-Lied is protected speech (although two of the biggest mastodon instances are barely moderated at all, so careful where you post! Mastodon is open-source software like WordPress or bulletin board software, so it gets used by people who say and do things you hate). Because its hard to find old Mastodon posts and I delete them after a few months anyways, here is a one-stop shop for the new instances, lists of accounts with a common theme, and groups I have found (Mastodon groups work like mailing lists, they take incoming messages and broadcast them to subscribers).
Apparently twitter is in trouble (for readers in the future, twitter was a microblogging service especially popular from 2016 to 2022 with hundreds of millions of users, heavy representation among thinky talky Anglos and elected officials posting under their real names, where who people followed and clicked on and most of their posts were public; users were showed a feed of posts selected by a secret algorithm). Internet communities tend to be pompous about themselves, and pompous twitter users pronounce that it is a public square or a town square. I have another simile.
