Above: The Levdeo (or Letin) i3, not exactly the ideal model with which to commemorate another Autocade milestone.
Autocade will cross the 23 million page view mark today, so weâre keeping fairly consistent with netting a million every three months, a pattern that weâve seen since the end of 2019.
Just to keep my record-keeping straight:
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for 10th million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for 11th million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for 12th million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for 13th million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for 14th million)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for 15th million)
June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for 16th million)
October 2019: 17,000,000 (four months for 17th million)
December 2019: 18,000,000 (just under three months for 18th million)
April 2020: 19,000,000 (just over three months for 19th million)
July 2020: 20,000,000 (just over three-and-a-half months for 20th million)
October 2020: 21,000,000 (three months for 21st million)
January 2021: 22,000,000 (three months for 22nd million)
April 2021: 23,000,000 (three months for 23rd million)
I see on my 22 millionth page view post I mentioned there were 4,379 entries. It hasnât increased that much since: the site is on 4,423. I notice the pace does slow a bit once the year kicks off in earnest: itâs the Christmas break that sees me spending a bit more time on the website.
Who knows? I may spend more on it again as Iâm tiring of the tribalism of Twitter, and, most recently, being tarred with the same brush as someone I follow, even though I follow people I donât always agree withâincluding people with offensive views.
On April 4, I wrote there:
Earlier today @QueenOliviaStR and I were tagged into a lengthy thread, to which I donât think I have the right of response to the writer.
First up, I salute her. Secondly, she may disagree with how I use Twitter but I still support her. Thirdly, she should rightly do what she needs to in order to feel safe.
I donât wish to single out any account but if you go through my following list, there are people on there whose views many Kiwis would disagree with.
Some were good people who fell down rabbit holes, and some Iâve never agreed with from the start. So why do I follow them?
As I Tweeted last week, I object to being in a social media bubble. I think itâs unhealthy, and the cause of a lot of societal angst. Itâs why generally I dislike Big Tech as this is by design.
Secondly, if I shut myself off to opposing views, even abhorrent ones, how do I know what arguments they are using in order to counter them if the opportunity arises?
I would disagree that I am amicable with these accounts but I do agree to interacting with some of them on the bases that we originally found.
Ian, who is long gone from Twitter after falling down the COVID conspiracy rabbit hole, was a known anti-war Tweeter. I didnât unfollow him but I disagreed with where his thoughts were going.
The person who tagged us today didnât want to be exposed to certain views and thatâs fair. But remember, that person she didnât like will also be exposed to her views through me.
Iâll let you into something that might shock you: for a few years, when the debate began, I wasnât supportive of marriage equality, despite having many queer friends. It was more over semantics than their rights, but still, it isnât a view I hold today.
If this happened in social media land, I might have held on those views, but luckily I adopted the policy I do today: see what people are saying. And eventually I was convinced by people who wrote about their situations that my view was misinformed.
And while my following an account is not an endorsement of its views, by and large I follow more people with whom I agreeâwhich means the positive arguments that these people make could be seen by those who disagree with them.
People should do what is right for them but I still hold that bubbling and disengagement are dangerous, and create a group who double-down on their views. Peace!
Maybe itâs a generational thing: that some of us believe in the free flow of information, because that was the internet we joined. One that was more meritorious, and one where we felt we were more united with others.
We see what the contrary does. And those examples are recent and severe: weâve seen it with the US elections, with Myanmar, with COVID-19.
This isnât a dig at the person who took exception to my being connected to someone, and yes, even engaged them (though being ‘amicable’ is simply having good manners to everyone), because if those offensive views targeted me I wouldnât want to see them. And it is a poor design decision of Twitter to still show that person in oneâs Tweets if they have already blocked them, just because a mutual person follows them.
It is a commentary, however, on wider trends where social media and Google have created people who double-down on their views, or opened up the rabbit hole for them to fall intoâand keep them there.
It did use to be called social networking, where we made connections, supposedly for mutual benefit, maybe even the benefit of humanity, but now it’s commonly social media, because we don’t seem to really network with anyone else while we post about ourselves.
Unlike Alice, people donât necessarily return from Wonderland.
My faithâwhich I donât always bring up because one risks being tarred with the evangelical homophobic stereotypes that come with it in mainstream media and elsewhereâtells me that everyone can be redeemed, even those who hold abhorrent views.
Itâs why I didnât have a problem when Bill Clinton planned to see Kim Jong Il or when Donald Trump did see Kim Jong Un, because engagement is better than isolation. Unlike the US media, I donât change a view depending on the occupant of the Oval Office.
Iâve also seen some people who post awful things do incredibly kind things outside of the sphere of social media.
Which then makes you think that social media just arenât worth your timeâsomething I had already concluded with Facebook, and, despite following mostly people I do agree with, including a lot of automotive enthusiasts, I am feeling more and more about Twitter. Instead of the open forum it once was, you are being judged on whom you follow, based on isolated and rare incidents.
I donât know if itâs generational or whether weâve developed through technology people who prefer tribalism over openness.
Sometimes you feel you should just leave them to it and get on with your own stuffâand for every Tweet I once sent, maybe I should get on to some old emails and tidy that inbox instead. Or put up one of the less interesting models on Autocade. Not Instagramming muchâI think I was off it for nearly a month before I decided to post a couple of things on Easter Eveâhas been another step in the right direction, instead of poking around on a tiny keyboard beamed up to you from a 5Âœ-inch black mirror.
The computer, after all, is a tool for us, and we should never lose sight of that. Letâs see if I can stick with it, and use Mastodon, which still feels more open, as my core social medium for posting.
A lot of the world’s population has come together in the fight against COVID-19. Except Facebook, of course, who is exploiting the virus for profit. Facebook has done well in the first quarter of 2020 with positive earnings. Freedom From Facebook & Google co-chairs Sarah Miller and David Segal note (the links are theirs): ‘Facebook has exploited a global pandemic to grow their monopoly and bottom line. Theyâve profited from ads boasting fake cures and harmful information, allowed ad targeting to âpseudoscienceâ audiences, permitted anti-stay-at-home protests to organize on the platform, and are now launching a COVID âData for Goodâ endeavour to harvest even more of our personal information.
âMake no mistake, Facebook having more of your data is never âgood”, nor will they just relinquish the collected data when the pandemicâs curve has been flattened. Rather, theyâll bank it and continue to profit from hyper-targeted ads for years to come.’
It’s been a few weeks (April 19 was my last post on this subject) since I last crunched these numbers but it does appear that overall, COVID-19 infections as a percentage of tests done are dropping, several countries excepting. Here is the source.
France 167,178 of 724,574 = 23·07%
UK 171,253 of 901,905 = 18·99%
Sweden 21,092 of 119,500 = 17·65%
USA 1,095,304 of 6,391,887 = 17·14%
Spain 239,639 of 1,455,306 = 16·47%
Singapore 17,101 of 143,919 = 11·88%
KSA 22,753 of 200,000 = 11·38%
Switzerland 29,586 of 266,200 = 11·11%
Italy 205,463 of 1,979,217 = 10·38%
Germany 163,009 of 2,547,052 = 6·40%
South Korea 10,774 of 623,069 = 1·73%
Australia 6,766 of 581,941 = 1·16%
New Zealand 1,479 of 139,898 = 1·06%
Taiwan 429 of 63,340 = 0·68%
Hong Kong 1,038 of 154,989 = 0·67%
Emmerdale fans will never forgive me. I’ve not been one to watch British soaps, finding them uninteresting. However, in this household, we have had Emmerdale on since it’s scheduled between TV1âs midday bulletin and the 1 p.m. government press conference on COVID-19, or, as some of us call it, The Ashley Bloomfield Show, named for our director-general of health who not only has to put up with all of this, but took a hit to one-fifth of his pay cheque. Naturally, one sings along to the Emmerdale theme, except I have no clue about its lyrics. Are there lyrics?
Never used to leave the TV on for #Emmerdale, but with #COVID19 I doâand like many, I sing along:
Who the hell cares what goes on at that farm? Donât really know who has come to some harm. Whatever you see, thereâs no cause for alarm, When we peer in the lives of Emmerdale.
Not a single like on Twitter or Mastodon. I’ve offended a heck of a lot of people.
We are supposedly at Level 3, which someone said was Level 4 (the full lockdown) with takeaways. However, we’ve gone from the 1960s-style near-empty motorways to this almost immediately.
A few thoughts about Twitter from the last 24 hours, other than âPlease leave grown-up discussions to grown-upsâ: (a) itâs probably not a smart idea to get aggro (about a joke you donât understand because you arenât familiar with the culture) from your companyâs account, especially when you donât have a leg to stand on; (b) deleting your side of the conversation might be good if your boss ever checks, although on my end âreplying to [your company name]â is still there for all to see; and (c) if your job is âChief Marketing Officerâ then it may pay to know that marketing is about understanding your audiences (including their culture), not about signalling that your workplace hires incompetently and division must rule the roost.
Iâm not petty enough to name names (I’ve forgotten the person but I remember the company), but it was a reminder why Twitter has jumped the shark when some folks get so caught up in their insular worlds that opposing viewpoints must be shouted down. (And when that fails, to stalk the account and start a new thread.)
The crazy thing is, not only did this other Tweeter miss the joke that any Brit born, well, postwar would have got, I actually agreed with him politically and said so (rule number one in marketing: find common ground with your audience). Nevertheless, he decided to claim that I accused Britons of being racist (why would I accuse the entirety of my own nationâI am a dual nationalâof being racist? Itâs nowhere in the exchange) among other things. That by hashtagging #dontmentionthewar in an attempt to explain that Euroscepticism has been part of British humour for decades meant that I was âobsessed by warâ. Guess he never saw The Italian Job, either, and clearly missed when Fawlty Towers was voted the UKâs top sitcom. I also imagine him being very offended by this, but it only works because of the preconceived notions we have about ‘the Germans’:
The mostly British audience found it funny. Why? Because of a shared cultural heritage. There’s no shame in not getting it, just don’t get upset when others reference it.
Itâs the classic ploy of ignoring the core message, getting angry for the sake of it, and when one doesnât have anything to go on, to attack the messenger. I see enough of that on Facebook, and itâs a real shame that this is what a discussion looks like on Twitter for some people.
I need to get over my Schadenfreude as I watched this person stumble in a vain attempt to gain some ground, but sometimes people keep digging and digging. And I donât even like watching accident scenes on the motorway.
And I really need to learn to mute those incapable of sticking to the factsâI can handle some situations where you get caught up in your emotions (weâre all guilty of this), but you shouldnât be blinded by them.
What I do know full well now is that there is one firm out there with a marketing exec who fictionalizes what you said, and it makes you wonder if this is the way this firm behaves when there is a normal commercial dispute. Which might be the opposite to what the firm wished.
As one of my old law professors once said (Iâm going to name-drop: it was the Rt Hon Prof Sir Geoffrey Palmer, KCMG, AC, QC, PC), âThe more lawyers there are, the more poor lawyers there are.â Itâs always been the same in marketing: the more marketers there are, the more poor marketers there are. And God help those firms that let the latter have the keys to the corporate Twitter account.
I enjoyed that public law class with Prof Palmer, and I wish I could remember other direct quotations he made. (I remember various facts, just not sentences verbatim like that oneâthen again I donât have the public law expertise of the brilliant Dr Caroline Morris, who sat behind me when we were undergrads.)
Itâs still very civil on Mastodon, and one of the Tooters that I communicate with is an ex-Tweeter whose account was suspended. I followed that account and there was never anything, to my knowledge, that violated the TOS on it. But Twitter seems to be far harder to gauge in 2019â20 on just what will get you shut down. Guess it could happen any time to anyone. Shall we expect more in their election year? Be careful when commenting on US politics: it mightnât be other Tweeters you need to worry about. And they could protect bots before they protect you.
Since I havenât Instagrammed for agesâI think I only had one round of posting in mid-Januaryâhereâs how the sun looked to the west of my office. I am told the Canberra fires have done this. Canberra is some 2,300 km away. For my US readers, this is like saying a fire in Dallas has affected the sunlight in New York City.
Iâve had a big life change, and I think thatâs why Instagramming has suddenly left my routine. I miss some of the contact, and some dear friends message me there, knowing that doing so on Facebook makes no sense. I did give the impression to one person, and I publicly apologize to her, that I stopped Instagramming because the company is owned by Facebook, but the fact is Iâve done my screen time for the day and Iâve no desire to check my phone and play with a buggy app. Looks like seven years (late 2012 to the beginning of 2020) was what it took for me to be Instagrammed out, shorter than Facebook, where it took 10 (2007 to 2017).
With the Twitter advertising preference monster continuing to gather preferences on all of us even after opting outâwhich basically makes Twitter FacebookâI decided to switch the MastodonâTwitter Crossposter around.
With Twitter being my main social network, I was quite happy to allow the Crossposter to take my Tweets and turn them into Toots on Mastodon, and Iâd check in to the latter regularly to respond to people.
But with this latest discovery, Iâm having second thoughts. We all know Twitter censors, and protects bigots, and its latest way to make a quick buck crosses a line.
I know most people have lines that they redraw regularly, especially when it comes to social media and phone apps, but Iâm trying to manage mine a little better.
What Iâll miss is the news: I get plenty from Twitter, often breaking items. Iâll have to find an equivalent, or a news bot, on Mastodon. Iâll also miss interactions with real friends Iâve made on the service. It was incredible to get the condolence messages from Twitter. But if Stephen Fry can walk away from time to time, leaving millions there, I can probably take some time out from the 5,200 following me.
Note that I wonât cease going to Twitter altogether: Iâm not going cold turkey. There’s a bunch of us supporting one another through Alzheimer’s in the family, so I still want to be there for them. But if plans go well, then it wonât be my main social network any more. Twitterâs advertising clients will all miss me, because I simply never consented to Twitter compiling info to micro-target me. Mastodon will get my info first.
And if Mastodon, one day, decides to do ads, I actually wonât mind, as long as they donât cross that line. If Iâve opted out of personalization, I expect them to respect it. Even Google respects this, and they’re a dodgy bunch. The fact I have an IP address tied to my country, and that Iâve given some personal info about me, is, in my book, enough. Besides, anyone who knows me will know that a lot of the preferences shown in Twitter have no connection with meâjust as Facebookâs were completely laughable.
PS.: Dlvr.it does not take RSS feeds to send to Mastodon. I’m trying out the Activitypub plug-in for Wordpress instead.
I think the signs of a departure from Twitter are all there. Certainly on a cellphone there’s little point to it any more. As of last week, this began happening.
If you donât seesee me on Twitter as often, itâs becausebecause itâsitâs no longer compatible withwith the Swype keyboardkeyboard on my phonephone. I canâtcanât be botheredbothered correcting faults createdcrcreated by technologytechnology and not me. Other sites are fine.
That last sentence refers only to the fact that Twitter is the only website on the planet where the keyboard is incompatible. (Thanks to Andrew McPherson for troubleshooting this with me.) Other sites are buggy, too: earlier today I couldn’t delete something from Instagram (being owned by Facebook means all the usual Facebook databasing problems are creeping in), and one video required four upload attempts before it would be visible to others:
I couldn’t reply on the Facebook website to a direct message (clicking in the usual typing field does nothing, and typing does nothing) except in image form, so I sent my friend this:
Earlier this year, many friends began experiencing trouble with their Facebook comments: the cursor would jump back to the beginning of text fields, pushing the first few characters they typed to the end. Others are complaining of bugs more and more oftenâreminds me of where I was four or five years ago. And we all now know about Facebook bots, four years after I warned of an ‘epidemic’.
It’s as I always expected: those of us who use these sites more heavily encounter the bugs sooner. Vox was the same: I left a year before Six Apart closed it down, and the bugs I encountered could never be fixed. I’m actually going through a similar battle with Amazon presently, blog post to come.
Now, since Mastodon and others work perfectly fine, and there’s no end of trouble to Big Tech, it’s inevitable that we jump ship, isn’t it?
I like apples. So youâre anti pears then. No, I just prefer apples. So you hate pears. I never said that. Fucking pear hater. I donât hate pears! Yes you do. You make me sick. Scum.
Then, within days, it played out pretty much exactly like this when Frank Oz Tweeted that he did not conceive of Bert and Ernie as gay. Or how Wil Wheaton can never seem to escape false accusations that he is anti-trans or anti-LGBQ, to the point where he left Mastodon. In his words (the link is mine):
I see this in the online space all the time now: mobs of people, acting in bad faith, can make people they donât know and will likely never meet miserable, or even try to ruin their lives and careers (look at what they did to James Gunn). And those mobsâ bad behaviors are continually rewarded, because itâs honestly easier to just give them what they want. We are ceding the social space to bad people, because they have the most time, the least morals and ethics, and are skilled at relentlessly attacking and harassing their targets. It only takes few seconds for one person to type âfuck offâ and hit send. That person probably doesnât care and doesnât think about how their one grain of sand quickly becomes a dune, with another person buried beneath it.
Oh goodness, what fun twitter was in the early days, a secret bathing-pool in a magical glade in an enchanted forest ⊠But now the pool is stagnant âŠ
To leave that metaphor, let us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended â worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know ⊠It makes sensible people want to take an absolutely opposite point of view.
Not that long ago I was blocked by a claimed anti-Zionist Tweeter who exhibited these very traits, and I had to wonder whether he was a troll who was on Twitter precisely to stir hatred of Palestinians. With bots and fake accounts all over social media (I now report dozens of bots daily on Instagram, which usually responds with about five messages a day saying they had done something, leaving thousands going back years untouched), you have to wonder.
Years ago, too, a Facebook post I made about someone in Auckland adopting an American retail phrase (I forget what it was, as I don’t use it, but it was ‘Black’ with a weekday appended to it) had the daughter of two friends who own a well known fashion label immediately jump to ‘Why are you so against New Zealand retailers?’ I was “unfriended” (shock, horror) over this, but because I’m not Wil Wheaton, this didn’t get to the Retailers’ Association mobilizing all its members to have me kicked off Facebook. It’s a leap to say that a concern about the creeping use of US English means I hate retailers, and all but the most up-tight would have understood the context.
This indignant and often false offence that people take either shows that they have no desire to engage and learn something, and that they are in reality pretty nasty, or that they have one personality in real life and another on social media, the latter being the one where the dark side gets released. Reminds me of a churchgoer I know: nice for a period on Sundays to his fellow parishioners but hating humanity the rest of the decade.
Some decent people I know on Twitter say they are staying, because to depart would let the bastards win, and I admire that in them. For now, Mastodon is a friendly place for me to be, even if I’m now somewhat wary after the way Wheaton was treated, but the way social media, in general, are is hardly pleasing. Those of us who were on the web early had an ideal in mind, of a more united, knowledgeable planet. We saw email become crappier because of spammers, YouTube become crappier because of commenters (and Google ownership), and Wikipedia become crappier because it has been gamed at its highest levels, so it seems it’s inevitable, given the record of the human race, that social media would also descend with the same pattern. Like in General Election voting, too many are self-interested, and will act against their own interests, limiting any chance they might have for growth in a fairer society. To borrow Stephen’s analogy, we can only enjoy the swimming pool if we don’t all pee in it.
The following status update was posted on my Facebook wall to some of my friends earlier tonight, though of course the links have been added here.
I realize thereâs some irony in posting this on Facebook.
Some of you will have noticed that I havenât been updating as frequently. Thatâs in line with global trends: personal sharing was down 25 per cent year on year between 2015 and 2016, and 29 per cent between 2016 and 2017. After 10 years on Facebook, sometimes I feel Iâve shared enough.
Even on my own blog, I havenât done as much in-depth on branding, because my theories and beliefs havenât markedly changed.
None of ours do too much. I may have changed a handful of minds through discussions Iâve had here, and on occasion youâve changed my mind. Iâve seen how some of you have terrible arguments, and how brilliant others are. But overall, has the past decade of exchanges really been worth that much? Some of you here are on the left of politics, and some of you on the right. I hope through dialogue you all wound up with a mutual understanding of one another. I have seen some of you come to a very healthy respect on this wall, and that was worth it. But I wonder if it is my job to be âhosting debatesâ. Those debates simply serve to underline that all my friends are decent people, and Iâve made good choices over the last decade on who gets to read this wall in full. None of it has changed what I thought of you, unless in those very rare examples youâve shown yourself to be totally incapable of rational thought (and youâve probably left in a huff anyway). It shows Iâm open-minded enough to have friends from all over the world of all political persuasions, faiths, beliefs, sexual orientations, gender identities, educational levels, and socioeconomic grouping, because none of that ultimately says whether you are a decent human being or not. At the end of the day, that is the only real measure.
If youâre reading this, then we know each other personally, and you know where this is heading. Youâll find me increasingly more at Mastodon, Hubzilla, Blogcozy, Instagram (I know, itâs owned by Facebook) and my own blog. We donât exactly need this forum to be messaging and debating. I will continue to frequent some groups and look after some pages, including my public page here on Facebook.
And of course Iâll continue writing, but not on a site that feeds malware to people (Facebook has bragged about this officially), tracks your preferences after opting out, tolerates sexual harassment,keeps kiddie porn and pornography online even after reports are filed, and has an absolutely appalling record of removing bots and spammers. These are all a matter of record.
If I mess up, I trust you, as my friends, to contact me through other means and to tell me Iâve been a dick. If you agree or disagree with viewpoints, there are blog comments or other means of voicing that, or, as some of you have done on Facebook (because you, too, have probably realized the futility of engaging in comments), you can send me a message. Heck, you could even pick up the phone. And if you want to congratulate me, well, that should be easy.
Of course itâs not a complete farewell. As long as this account stays openâand Facebook wonât let you manage pages without oneâthen the odd update will still wind up on this wall. I may feel strongly enough about something that it demands sharing. But, 10 years later, there are better places to be having conversations, especially as social media democratizes and users demand that they have control over their identities and how to use them.
