“an unending stream of disconnected posts”

A quote from Luke Harris I’m sniping from Rach:

I’m on Mastodon, but I’m bored of what I call “the timeline era”. Scanning an unending stream of disconnected posts for topics of interest is no longer fun, I prefer deciding what to read based on titles, or topic-based discussion.

I keep thinking about that. I wonder if people, generally, are growing tired of seeing an unending stream of disconnected things. Surely some are, but I don’t think so overall. People aren’t leaving Twitter because they don’t like Twitter and that endless disconnected stream; they are leaving because the owner is a bad person. All social media is an endless stream of disconnected nuggets these days. TikTok is nothing but forever swiping and being fed nuggets the great algorithm thinks you will like.

There is something to think about here, though, and I think it has to do with moods. Different moods and different situations mean a different tolerance for consumption.

• Morning/focused/well-rested: I like my RSS feeds. Still random and disconnected, but far less random than social media is, because I’ve hand-chosen the feeds and there are no algorithms at work.
• Long day/Exhausted: Feed me random nuggets! I just want low-effort entertainment. Algorithmically personalized to me is fine and actually kinda good.
• Chill weekend/freezing cold outside: It’s book time.

That’s just spitballing a little on this. I guess my point is that sometimes I want the disconnected randomness of social media because I’m a zombie anyway, and I have zero effort points to give. It’s the channel surfing of yore. The more mental energy I have, the less it should go toward randomness. That time should be more focused and well-considered. But it’s all-too easy to mismatch moods and attempt a mode of consumption that isn’t the right vibe.

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Related?

I saw this post by Maximillian Piras that had some design concepts for Twitter in it, like:

The point there was feeding the algorithm by being able to measure time-user-stared-at-tweet, apparently. But to me it also reads like: we know all these things are random and disconnected; here’s a way at least to only look at one at a time.