Missionaries and Mercenaries

When a company gets founded, it does so by a bunch of “missionaries”. Founders seldom are in it solely for the money (though that is obviously one big reason they are there). They found companies because they are “missionary” about the purpose that the company wants to achieve (it doesn’t matter what this mission is – it varies from company to company).

As they start building the company, they look for more missionaries to help them to do it. Rather, among early employees, there is a self selection that happens – only people who are passionate about the mission (or maybe passionate about the founders) survive, and those in it for other purposes just move on.

And this way, the company gets built, and grows. However, there comes a point when this strategy becomes unsustainable. A largish company needs a whole different set of skills from what made the company large in the first place. And some of these skills are specialist enough that it is not going to be easy to attract employees who are both good at this specialisation and passionate enough about the company’s mission.

These people look at their jobs as just that – jobs. They are good at what they do and capable of taking the company forward. However, they don’t share the “mission”, and this means to attract them, you need to be able to serve their “needs”.

For starters, they demand to be paid more. Then, they need the recognition that the job is just a job for them – they need their holidays and “benefits” and “work life balance” and decent working hours and all that. These are things people who are missionary about the business don’t necessarily need – the purpose of the mission means that they are able to “adjust”.

The choice to move from a missionary organisation to a more “mercenary” organisation (not just talking of money here, but also other benefits and perks) needs to be a conscious one from the point of view of the company. At some point, the company needs to recognise that it cannot run on missionary fuel alone and make changes (in structure and function and what not) to accommodate mercenaries and let them grow the business.

The choice of this timing is something a lot of companies don’t get right. Some do it too late – they try to run on missionary fuel for way longer than it is sustainable, and then find it impossible to change culture. This leads to a revolving door of mercenaries and the company unable to leverage their talents.

Others – such as Twitter – do it way too early. One thing that seems to be clear (to me) from the recent wave of layoffs at the company, and also having broadly followed the company for a long time (I’ve had a twitter account since 2008), is that the company “went professional” too early.

There was a revolving door of founders in the initial days, until Jack Dorsey came back to run the company (apart from running Square) for a few years. This revolving door meant that the company, from its early days, was forced to rely on professional management – mercenaries in other words. Over a period of time, this resulted in massive bloat. The company struggled along until Elon Musk came in with an outlandish bid and bought it outright.

From the commentary that I see on twitter now, what Musk seems to be doing is to take the company back to “missionaries”. Take his recent letter for example. He is demanding that staff “work long hours at high intensity“. A bunch have resigned in protest (in addition to last week’s layoffs).

The objective of all these exercises – abrasive management style, laying off half the people first, and then putting onerous work conditions on the rest – is to simply weed out all the mercenaries. The only people who will agree to “work long hours at high intensity” will be “missionaries” – people who are passionate about growing the company and will do what it takes to get there.

Musk’s bet, in my opinion (and based on what I’ve read elsewhere), is that the company was massively overstaffed in the first place, and that there is a sufficient quorum of missionaries who will stay on and take the company forward. The reason he is doing all this in public (using his public twitter account to give instructions to his employees, for example) is the hope that these actions might attract potential missionaries from outside to beef up the staff.

I have no clue if this will succeed. At the heart of it, a 16 year old company wanting to run on missionaries only doesn’t make sense. However, given that the company had been listing (no pun intended), this might be necessary for a temporary reboot.

However, one thing I know is that this needs to be an “impulse” (in the physics sense of the term). A short and powerful jab to move the company forward. At an old company like this, running on missionaries can’t be sustainable. So they better fix the company soon and then move it on a more sustainable mercenary path.

Social Media Regulation

To use (and abuse) my good friend Sangeet Paul Choudary‘s framework, Twitter is both a pipe and a platform. Whether it is a pipe or a platform depends on how you use it.

I always use Twitter in the “latest tweets” mode, which means that tweets from people I follow are shown to me in the order in which they happen, with most recent tweets on top. Twitter has no role in showing what tweets I see or not see. Someone I follow says something, it will come in its appointed place. This is the twitter in its “pipe avatar”. It is no different from reading blogs through an RSS feed. Twitter is just a pipe to convey these tweets to me.

However, this “latest tweets” is not the default mode for Twitter. The default mode is what I think it calls “top tweets” or something. This is the algorithmic timeline that Twitter launched a few years back. Here, twitter’s algorithms determine what you should see. Whether a tweet gets shown to you at all, whether you follow someone whose tweets you are shown and what order tweets are shown to you in – none of these are under your control. It is twitter’s (rather, and understandably, opaque) algorithm that determines this. This is twitter operating in its “platform avatar”, since it, through its algorithms, is effectively controlling the content you see.

Why is it important if twitter is a pipe or a platform? It has to do with regulation. I understand that twitter and facebook have recently suspended Donald Trump’s account. Some people are saying this is unfair, and that it is a step too far for social media. Others are using this as an excuse for more social media regulation.

My contention is that whether social media should be regulated or not is guided by whether social media is a pipe or a platform.

If social media is a pipe, like twitter in its latest tweets (or “traditional”) format, then regulation is unnecessary. In this situation, people are served tweets only because they’ve chosen to receive them. If some account only tells lies, so be it. People follow parody accounts all the time. By censoring accounts, twitter is denying people the right to see the thing they have subscribed to see. Any regulation or censorship means that people are not getting what they have signed up for.

On the other hand, in the algorithmic timeline format, one can make a case for some kind of regulation or censorship. This is because the platform here, either implicitly or explicitly, chooses what the user sees. And if the platform’s algorithms mean that lies and hatred and outrage get amplified, then that is a problem. If a tweet from a parody account suddenly appears in my timeline, it can throw me off and drive me bonkers. And that is not “fair”.

Then again, while one can make a case for censorship in the “platform model”, I’m not advocating that regulation or censorship is necessary. Yes, the opaque algorithms can amplify bad shit, but how are you going to even regulate that?

You want algorithms to be passed by some central board? You want the platform to deplatform your opponents but not your folks? You want a profit-maximising (likely monopoly) private entity to determine what is “truth” and what is not? Irrespective of how the regulation or censorship is defined, it is rather easy for it to have consequences that the designers of the regulation or censorship have least expected.

In any case, these occasional cals for censorship or regulation or cancellation are the reasons why I put most of my better arguments on this blog, which gets delivered through this pipe called RSS feeds.

Twitter and bang-bang control

People who follow me on twitter must be aware that I’m prone to taking periodic sabbaticals from the platform. The reasons vary. Sometimes it’s addiction. Sometimes it’s the negativity. Sometimes it’s the outrage. Sometimes it’s the surfeit of information.

The period of the sabbaticals also vary. Sometimes it lasts barely a day. Sometimes a week. Sometimes even a few months. However, each time I end a twitter sabbatical, I promise myself that “this time I will use the platform in moderation”. And each time it doesn’t happen.

I go headlong into being addicted, feeding off all the positive and negative feelings that the platform sets off. I get sucked into looking for that one more notification of who has followed me, or who has said something to me.

And so it happens. In control theory they call this “bang bang control“. I’m either taking a sabbatical from Twitter, or spending half my waking hours on the platform. I’ve wondered why this happens, but until today I didn’t have the answer. Now I think I do.

As it happens I’m in the middle of yet another sabbatical. Unlike some of my earlier ones, I didn’t announce the sabbatical to the world. One night I simply logged off. However, it’s not a full sabbatical.

Once a week I log on to check messages and notifications. While I’m at it, I read a few tweets. Last weekend, I read tweets for an hour or so, and put out some tweets in that time as well. Earlier today, this process lasted ten minutes. I got bored.

I mean, some of the tweets were interesting. Some were insightful. I might have even read a tweetstorm or two. I surely clicked on 5-6 links, thus opening new tabs. But ten minutes later, there was nothing to the platform.

Maybe because I’ve tweeted sparingly in the last two weeks, there were no notifications. I’ve completely missed out on all the memes that have dominated twitter for the last one week but haven’t been big enough to make it to the Times of India (my main source for mainstream news).

I’ve possibly forgotten the personas I’ve built up in my head of people who I follow on Twitter but who I don’t know in real life – shorn of these personas their tweets have seemed inane.

Putting it another way, twitter has this massive feedback loop. The more time you spend on it, the more sense it makes. And so you spend even more time on it.

When you spend little time on Twitter, a lot of tweets don’t make sense  to you. Shorn of the context, they are simply meaningless. It is usually not possible to convey both meaning and context in 280 characters or less.

And that explains it. The positive feedback loop of the platform. When you use it sparingly, there is little base for the positive feedback to kick in. And so you can get bored. But spend a couple of hours on one day on the platform, and the positive loop starts kicking in.

And then addiction happens.

Credentialed and credential-less networks

Recently I tried out Instagram Reels, just to see what the big deal about it is. The first impression wasn’t great. My feed was filled with famous people (KL Rahul was there, along with some bollywood actresses), doing supposedly funny things. Compared to the little I had seen of TikTok (I had the app installed for a day last year), this was barely funny.

In fact, from my first impression it seems like Instagram Reels is a sort of bastard child of TikTok and Quibi (I took a 90 day trial of Quibi and uninstalled after a month, having used it 2-3 times and got bored each time). There is already a “prior reputation network”, based on people’s followers on the main Instagram product. And Reels takes off on this.

This means that for a new person coming into this supposedly new social network, the barriers to entry to getting more followers is rather high. They need to compete with people who already have built their reputations elsewhere (either on the Instagram main product, or in the case of someone like KL Rahul, completely offline).

I was reading this blogpost yesterday that compared and contrasted social networking in the 2000s (blogs) with that of the 2010s (twitter). It’s a nice blogpost, though I should mention that it sort of confirms my biases since I sort of built my reputation using my blog in the late 2000s.

That post makes the same point – blogs created their own reputation networks, while twitter leverages people’s reputations from elsewhere.

The existence of the blue checks points to the way in which the barriers that a new blogger faced entering a community was far lower than is currently the case on twitter. The start-up costs of blogging were higher, but once somebody integrated themselves into a community and began writing, they were judged on the quality of that writing alone. Very little attention was paid to who that person was outside of the blogosphere. While some prominent and well known individuals blogged, there was nothing like the “blue checks” we see on twitter today. It is not hard to understand why this is. Twitter is an undifferentiated mass of writhing souls trying to inflict their angry opinions on the earth. Figuring out who to listen to in this twist of two-sentences is difficult. We use a tweeter’s offline affiliations to separate the wheat and the chaff.

For the longest time, I refrained from putting my real name on this blog (though it was easy enough to triangulate my identity based on all the things I’d written here). This was to create a sort of plausible deniability in case some employer somewhere got pissed off with what I was writing.

Most of the blogosphere was similarly pseudonymous (or even anonymous). A lot of people I got to know through their blogging, I learnt about them from their writing before I could know anything else about them (that came from their “offline lives”). Reputation outside the blogosphere didn’t matter – your standing as a blogger depended on the quality of blogposts, and comments on other people’s blogposts only.

It is similar with TikTok – it’s “extreme machine learning” means that people’s reputations outside the network don’t matter in terms of people’s following on the network, and how likely they are to appear in people’s feeds. Instead, all that matters is the quality of the content on the platform, based (in TikTok’s case) on user engagement on the platform.

So as we look for an alternative to replace TikTok, given that the Chinese Communist Party seems to be able to get supposedly confidential data from it, we need to remember that we need a “fresh network”, or a “credential free” network.

Instagram has done something it’s good at, which is copying. However, given that it relies on existing credentials, Reels will never have the same experience as TikTok. Neither will any other similar product created from an existing social network. What we need is something that can create its own reputation network, bottom up.

Then again, blogging was based on an open platform so it was easy for people to build their networks. With something like TikTok relying heavily on network effects and algorithmic curation, I don’t know if such a thing can happen there.

I don’t know which 80%

Legendary retailer John Wanamaker (who pioneered fixed price stores in the mid 1800s) is supposed to have said that “half of all advertising is useless. The trouble is I don’t know which half”.

I was playing around with my twitter archive data, and was looking at the distribution of retweets and favourites across all my tweets. To say that it follows a power law is an understatement.

Before this blog post triggers an automated tweet, I have 63793 tweets, of which 59,275 (93%) have not had a single retweet. 51,717 (81%) have not had a single person liking them. And 50, 165 (79%) of all my tweets have not had a single retweet or a favourite.

In other words, nearly 80% of all my tweets had absolutely no impact on the world. They might as well have not existed. Which means that I should cut down my time spent tweeting down to a fifth. Just that, to paraphrase Wanamaker, I don’t know which four fifths I should eliminate!

There is some good news, though. Over time, the proportion of my tweets that has no impact (in terms of retweets or favourites – the twitter dump doesn’t give me the number of replies to a tweet) has been falling consistently.

Right now, this month, the score is around 33% or so. So even though the proportion of my useless tweets have been dropping over time, even now one in every tweets that I tweet has zero impact.

My “most impactful tweet” itself account for 17% of all retweets that I’ve got. Here I look at what proportion of tweets have accounted for what proportion of “reactions” (reactions for each tweet is defined as the sum of number of retweets and number of favourites. I understand that the same person might have been retweeted and favourited something, but I ignore that bit now).

Notice how extreme the graph is. 0.7% of all my tweets have accounted for 50% of all retweets and likes! 10% of all my tweets have accounted for 90% of all retweets and likes.

Even if I look only at recent data, it doesn’t change shape that much – starting from January 2019, 0.8% of my tweets have accounted for 50% of all retweets and likes.

This, I guess, is the fundamental nature of social media. The impact of a particular tweet follows a power law with a very small exponent (meaning highly unequal).

What this also means is that anyone can go viral. Anyone from go from zero to hero in a single day. It is very hard to predict who is going to be a social media sensation some day.

So it’s okay that 80% of my tweets have no traction. I got one blockbuster, and who knows – I might have another some day. I guess such blockbusters is what we live for.

Open and closed platforms

This is a blogpost that I had planned a very long time (4-5 weeks) ago, and I’m only getting down to write it now. So my apologies if the quality is not as good as my blogposts usually are. 

Many of you would have looked at the title of this blogpost and assumed that the trigger for this was the “acquisition” of Joe Rogan’s podcast by Spotify. For a large sum of money, Spotify is “taking his podcast private”, making it exclusive to Spotify subscribers.

However, this is only an “immediate trigger” for writing this post. I’d planned this post way back in April when I’d written one of my Covid-19 related blogposts – maybe it was this one.

I had joked the post needed to be on Medium for it to be taken seriously (a lot of covid related analysis was appearing on Medium around that time). Someone suggested I actually put it on Medium. I copied and pasted it there. Medium promptly took down my post.

I got pissed off and swore to never post on Medium again. I got reminded of the time last year when Youtube randomly pulled down one of my cricket videos when someone (an IP troll, I later learnt) wrongly claimed that I’d used copyrighted sounds in my video (the only sound in that video was my own voice).  I had lodged a complaint with Youtube, and my video was resurrected, but it was off air for a month (I think).

Medium and Youtube are both examples of closed platforms. All content posted on these platforms are “native to the platform”. These platforms provide a means of distributing (and sometimes even marketing) the content, and all content posted there essentially belongs to the platform. Yes, you get paid a cut of the ad fee (in case your Youtube channel becomes super powerful, for example), but Youtube decides whether your video deserves to be there at all, and whose homepages to put it on.

The main feature of a closed platform is that any content created on the platform needs to be consumed on the same platform. A video I’ve uploaded on Youtube is only accessible on Youtube. A medium post can only be read on medium. A tweet can only be read on twitter. A Facebook post only on Facebook.

The advantage with closed platforms is that by submitting your content to the platform, you are hoping to leverage some benefits the platform might offer, like additional marketing and distribution, and discovery.

This blog doesn’t work that way. Blogposts work through this technology called “RSS”, and to read what I’m writing here you don’t need to necessarily visit noenthuda.com. You can read it on the feed reader of your choice (Feedly is what I use). Of course there is the danger that one feed reader can have overwhelming marketshare, and the destruction of that feed reader can kill the ecosystem itself (like it happened with Google Reader in 2013). Yet, RSS being an open platform means that this blog still exists, and you can continue to receive it on the RSS reader of your choice. If Medium were to shut down tomorrow, all Medium posts might be lost.

Another example of an open platform is email – it doesn’t matter what email service or app you use, my email and yours is interoperable. India’s Universal Payment Interface (UPI) is another open platform – the sender and receiver can use apps of their choice and still transact.

And yet another open platform (which a lot of people didn’t really realise is an open platform) is podcasting. Podcasts run on the RSS protocol. So when you subscribe to a podcast using Apple Podcasts, it is similar to adding a blog to your Feedly. This thread by Ben Thompson of Stratechery (that I just stumbled upon when I started writing this post) sums it up well:

What Spotify is trying to do (with the Joe Rogan and Ringer deals) is to take these contents off open platforms and put it on its own closed platform. Some people (like Rogan) will take the bait since they’re getting paid for it. However, this comes at the cost of control – like I’m not sure if we’ll have another episode of Rogan’s podcast where host and guest light up a joint.

Following my experiences with Medium and Youtube, when my content was yanked off for no reason (or for flimsy reasons), I’m not sure I like closed platforms any more. Rather, someone needs to pay me a lot of money to take my content to a closed platform (speaking of which, do you know that all my writing for Mint (written in 2013-18) is behind their newly erected paywall now?).

In closing I must mention that platforms being “open” and platforms being “free” are orthogonal. A paid podcast or newsletter is still on an open platform (see Ben Thompson tweetstorm above), since it can be consumed on a medium independent of the one where it was produced – essentially a different feed is generated depending on what the customer has paid for.

Now that I’ve written this post, I don’t know what the point of this is. Maybe it’s just for collecting and crystallising my own thoughts, which is the point behind most of my blogposts anyway.

PS: We have RSS feeds for text and podcasts for audio. I wonder why we don’t have a popular and open protocol for video.

Yet another social media sabbatical

Those of you who know me well know that I keep taking these social media sabbaticals. Once in a while I decide that I’m spending too much time on these platforms, wasting both time and mental energy, and log off. Time has come for yet another such break.

I had a bumper day on twitter yesterday. I wrote this one tweet storm that went viral. Some 2000 plus retweets and all that. Basically I used some 15 tweets to explain Bayes’s Theorem, a concept that most people find really hard to understand.

For the last 24 hours, my twitter mentions have been a mess. I’ve tried various things – applying filters, switching from the native app to tweetdeck, etc. but I find that I keep checking my mentions for that dopamine rush that comes out of new followers (I have some 1500 new followers after the tweetstorm, including Chris Arnade of Dignity fame), new retweets and new likes.

And the dopamine rush is frequently killed by hate, as a tweetstorm like this will inevitably generate. I did another tweetstorm this morning detailing this hate – it has to do with the “two Overton Windows” post I’d written a couple of weeks ago.

People are so deranged that even a maths tweetstorm (like the one at the beginning of this post) can be made political, and you see people go on and on.

In fact, there is this other piece I had written (for Mint, back in 2015) that again uses Bayes’s Theorem to explain online flamewars. Five years down, everything I wrote is true.

It is futile to engage with most people on Twitter, especially when they take their political selves too seriously. It can be exhausting, and 27 hours after I wrote that tweetstorm I’m completely exhausted.

So yeah this is not a social media sabbatical like my previous ones where I logged off all media. As things stand I’m only off Twitter (I’ve taken mitigating steps on other platforms to protect my blood pressure and serotonin).

Then again, those of you who know me well know that when I’m off twitter I’ll be writing more here. You can continue to expect that. I hope to be more productive here, and in my work (I’m swamped with work this lockdown) as well.

I continue to be available on WhatsApp, and Telegram, and email. Those of you who have my email or number can reach me in one of those places. For everything else, there’s the “contact” tab on this blog.

See you more regularly here in the coming days!

Should I tweet at all?

This is not a rhetorical question.

I was doing some random data analysis today. I downloaded an archive of all my tweets, and of all my blog posts, and was looking at some simple statistics. I won’t bore you with a lot of the mundane details.

One thing that I must mention is that the hypothesis that twitter activity has an adverse impact on my blogging is disproved. I was looking at the number of words I’ve put on twitter each week and the number of words I’ve blogged in the same week. The two are uncorrelated.

 

In any case, so far I’ve tweeted 60,716 tweets over the course of eleven and a half years. My tweets include at total of 992453 words. Ignoring other handles, links and punctuation, maybe we can round this down to 950000. In other words, in nine and a half years I’ve tweeted nine and a half hundred thousand words.

Or that on twitter alone I write a hundred thousand words a year. 

The content of my book was about 52,000 words (IIRC). In other words, I write enough content for two books EACH YEAR on twitter. In 2013, I tweeted nearly four books worth of content.

That, however, is not the only reason why I wonder if I should tweet at all. While I’ve discovered a lot of interesting people, and made interesting connections, and can “semi-keep-in-touch” with people through twitter, I’m not really sure about the “impact” of my tweets.

I thought I’ll look at the tweets that have been most retweeted.

full_text Date retweet_count favorite_count Link
Why does the government / ruling party put out tweets with basic arithmetic errors? ?14.98+?9.02 is ?24 not ?27.44 https://t.co/oFaBNDYgpc 2017-09-19 350 416 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/910122027306164229
Remember that Richter scale is logarithmic. Base 10 if I’m not wrong. So 7.7 is 10 times as bad as 6.7 2015-04-25 171 40 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/591858524147175425
Our @uber driver tonight was one Mr Akmal. He dropped us successfully. 2017-12-24 148 312 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/944964502071623681
The greatest Hindi movie about Rajputs is Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na 2017-11-24 142 299 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/934173502281801730
Based on interim data, in 17 states NOTA has got more votes than AAP. #MintElections #MeaninglessComparisons http://t.co/LxZvtNme1P 2014-05-16 134 19 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/467242247965007872
A whopping 332 out of 542 constituencies in the just-concluded General Elections saw a two-way contest. Another 184 saw three-way contests.

In contrast, in the 2014 elections only 169 two-way contests, 278 three-cornered contests and 90 four-cornered contests

2019-05-24 95 174 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1131912762357981184
“these dark days” is a euphemism for “people I didn’t vote for have formed the government” 2019-12-19 69 242 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1207659817579335681
I have built this app that recommends single malt whiskies based on what you already like.

https://t.co/B4PqxjUQI2

Details here: https://t.co/kc3yG1mx2o

2018-11-02 56 202 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1058347106438705153
Amazing number of commies on this list RT @suar4sure: “@BookLuster: Which dictator killed the most People? http://t.co/WlJDLAiMAn” 2014-07-23 44 13 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/491876757176188928
If BJP hadn’t split, numbers would have been: Cong: 91, BJP: 86, JDS: 35 @gkjohn 2013-05-08 39 3 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/332065593660407810
Today @moneycontrolcom / @CNNnews18 have unleashed a monstrosity of a map. The map explains nothing, and nothing can explain the map!

https://t.co/VOooy26Ra2

2019-02-21 36 80 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1098577156198805504
Stud thread https://t.co/gvuZIjV71I 2018-07-22 34 105 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1021130139290226688
there’s one piece of @ShashiTharoor ‘s writing that I’ve read multiple times – his blurb for my book. When I first read it, I was amazed at how precisely it communicated the idea of my book – much better than I’d ever managed to do. https://t.co/Lz2I9ZwW0L 2017-12-14 33 138 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/941357298840059904
Did you know the cube root law of assembly size?

It’s a heuristic that states that the optimal size of a national assembly is the cube root of the population

2019-12-13 27 80 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1205408450810798080
Great piece by Dheeraj Sanghi on the expulsion of students from IIT Roorkee: http://t.co/uxPduX680z 2015-07-12 27 11 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/620138692762415104
did the Chinese workers use One Belt to beat up the police, and then escape on One Road? https://t.co/7lldCWrpxq 2018-04-05 26 98 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/981886501456924672
I don’t know why people don’t get that a non-zero number that ends in zero is even.

This is absolutely bizarre https://t.co/fpZQB24l0a

2015-12-07 26 13 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/673831614581899264
the one thing AAP has succeeded in doing is to tremendously increase my respect for LokSatta and @JP_LOKSATTA http://t.co/8hjA5l8IKN 2014-05-14 25 16 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/466432370296762368
Coffee truck at avenue road. By coffee board voluntarily retired employees association. Brilliant coffee. Ten bucks. http://t.co/rBOgRh1F2l 2013-07-11 24 6 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/355201588505223170
And I present you the way the parliamentary constituencies in Bangalore are demarcated

https://t.co/1tcGCimdG9 https://t.co/8QPIOzajN4

2019-03-26 24 59 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1110574864803323905

Till date, I’ve had FIVE tweets with more than a hundred retweets. I’ve had ELEVEN tweets with more than a hundred likes (including one where I’ve simply said “stud thread” and then linked to a thread written by someone else).

In other words, while I might have four thousand odd followers, the amplification of my tweets is rather minimal.

So maybe I should not tweet at all? And instead devote the time and effort spent in tweeting to other means? Maybe write another book instead?

What do you think?

Social Media Addiction

Two months back I completely went off social media. I deleted the instagram app from my phone and logged out of Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook on my computer. I needed a detox. And I found myself far more focussed and happier after I did that. And I started writing more here.

My first month off social media was strict. No social media under any circumstance. This was necessary to get rid of the addiction. Then, since I came back from the Maldives trip, I’ve been logging into various social media accounts on and off (about once a day on average) just to see if there are any messages and to browse a bit.

I only do it from my computer, and at a time when I’m not fully working. And as soon as the session is over I make sure I log out immediately. So the instinctive adrenaline-seeking opening of social media tabs is met by a login screen, which is friction, and I close the tab. So far so good.

In my infrequent returns to social media I’ve found that the most “harmless” are LinkedIn and Facebook (it might help that I don’t follow anyone on the latter, and if I want to check out what’s happening in someone’s life I need to explicitly go to their profile rather than them appearing on my timeline). LinkedIn is inane. Two or three posts will tell you it’s a waste of time, and I quickly log out. Facebook is again nothing spectacular.

Twitter is occasionally interesting, and I end up scrolling for a fair bit. For the most part I’m looking for interesting articles rather than look at twitter arguments and fights. I’m convinced  that twitter statements and arguments don’t add much value – they’re most likely ill thought out. Instead a link to a longer form piece leads me to better fleshed out arguments, whether I like it or not.

Mostly after a little bit of twitter scrolling, I find enough pieces of outrage, or news/political stuff that I get tired and log out. It’s only when I really need an adrenaline rush and don’t mind people cribbing that I stay on twitter for a bit of a long time (over five minutes).

Instagram, on the other hand, is like smoking cigarettes. When I smoked my first cigarette in 2004 I felt weak in the knees and a sort of high. It was in my final year of college, so I’d had enough friends tell me that cigarette smoking is addictive. And my first cigarette told my why exactly it was addictive.

So I made a policy decision at that moment that I’d limit myself to a total of one cigarette a year. I’ve probably averaged half a cigarette a year since then. My last one was in 2016.

Instagram is really addictive. It’s full of pictures, and if you avoid the really whiny accounts there is little negativity or politics. People make an effort to look nice, and take nice pictures, for instagram. So there is a lot of beauty in there. And if I choose to, especially when I’m logging in after a long time, I can keep at it for hours.

Instead I need to be conscious that it’s addictive (like my one cigarette a year rule), and pull myself away and force myself to log out. This also means that while I open twitter about once a day, Instagram is less than once a week.

I wonder what this means about the sustainability of social networks!

Links

While discussing podcasts, a friend remarked last week that one of the best things about podcasts is the discovery of new hitherto unknown people.

In response I said that this was the function that blogs used to perform a decade ago. Back in the day, blogs were full of links, and to other blogs. Every blog hosted a column of “favourite” blogs. You could look up people’s livejournal friends pages. People left comments on each other’s blogs, along with links to their blogs.

So as you consumed interesting blog posts, you would naturally get linked to other interesting blogs, and discover new people (incidentally this was how my wife and I discovered each other, but that’s a story for another day).

Where blogs scored over today’s podcasts, however,  was that as they directed you to hitherto unknown people, they also pointed you to the precise place where you could consume more of their stuff – in the form of a blog link. So if you linked to this blog, a reader who landed up here could then discover more of me – well beyond whatever of me you featured on your blog along with your link.

And this is a missing link in the podcast – while podcast episodes have links to the guest’s work, it is not an easy organic process to go through to this link and start consuming the guest’s work (except I guess in terms of twitter accounts). Moreover, the podcast is an audio medium, so it’s not natural to go to the podcast page and click through to the links.

This is one of the tragedies of the decline of blogging (clearly I’m one of the holdouts of the blogging era, maybe because it’s served me so well). Organic discovery of new people and content is not as great as it used to be. Well, Twitter and retweets exist, but the short nature of the format is that it’s much harder to judge if someone is worth following there.