We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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4 Responses
I just came across your blog through your Book Habits post (which I plan on doing as well later today) and wanted to chime in with my agreement on how surprising it can be to discover which posts bring in the most traffic. I've been blogging now for about 9 months and the post that seems to draw the most traffic to my site is a short piece I wrote about Peter Pan for a Meme, which brings in readers on a regular basis although I wrote it months ago. I don't think I even wrote anything particularly memorable. Go figure.
Simcha: It is. The interesting thing is that the posts on this list aren't my heavy hitters in terms of visits. In fact, the one post that draws the most visitors, still, to this day, is the one I did years ago about this fake dragon in a jar they found in Europe or some place. I get so many hits to that for almost no reason.
I think for me, most of my most-commented-on posts were more controversial ones. I should probably write more stuff in that vein 😛
I also find that discussion topics receive more comments than other posts, though I'm not brave enough to actually post anything really controversial. But I do think I will try to find a way to insert Petr Pan into all of my posts from now on, after seeing how much traffic his name brings 🙂 And now I must go check out your piece on the fake dragon in the jar…
Simcha: The piece of the fake dragon wasn't even really mine. I saw an article about it and asked what it would be like if dragons were real. It's old and not particularly intelligent, but there are apparently only two places to find that darned picture these days, and one of them is mine. So, everyone seems to come to my post. It's weird.
Let me know if you can't find it.