Today's tempest in a toilet comes courtesy of the Hellsite. An award-winning author had the effrontery to suggest that fans aren't necessarily doing authors a favor by tagging them when they share a review of their work on social media. Their opinion seems to be that it's safest from a professional standpoint to not engage with reviews at all, whether they praise a work or excoriate it, so they'd rather not hear about them in the first place.
Alexandra Samuel (JSTOR Daily)Fourteen years ago, a dozen geeks gathered around our dining table for Tagsgiving dinner. No, that’s not a typo. In 2005, my husband and I celebrated Thanksgiving as “Tagsgiving,” in honor of the web technology that had given birth to our online community development shop. I invited our guests...
Tagging systems were “folksonomies:” chaotic, self-organizing categorization schemes that grew from the bottom up. ❧
There’s something that just feels so wrong in this article about old school tagging and the blogosphere that has a pullquote meant to encourage one to Tweet the quote. #irony
–December 04, 2019 at 11:03AM
I literally couldn’t remember when I’d last looked at my RSS subscriptions.
On the surface, that might seem like a win: Instead of painstakingly curating my own incoming news, I can effortlessly find an endless supply of interesting, worthwhile content that the algorithm finds for me. The problem, of course, is that the algorithm isn’t neutral: It’s the embodiment of Facebook and Twitter’s technology, data analysis, and most crucial, business model. By relying on the algorithm, instead of on tags and RSS, I’m letting an army of web developers, business strategists, data scientists, and advertisers determine what gets my attention. I’m leaving myself vulnerable to misinformation, and manipulation, and giving up my power of self-determination. ❧
–December 04, 2019 at 11:34AM
You might connect with someone who regularly used the same tags that you did, but that was because they shared your interests, not because they had X thousand followers. ❧
An important and sadly underutilized means of discovery. –December 04, 2019 at 11:35AM
I find it interesting that Alexandra’s Twitter display name is AlexandraSamuel.com while the top of her own website has the apparent title @AlexandraSamuel. I don’t think I’ve seen a crossing up of those two sorts of identities before though it has become more common for people to use their own website name as their Twitter name. Greg McVerry is another example of this.
Thanks to Jeremy Cherfas[1] and Aaron Davis[2] for the links to this piece. I suspect that Dr. Samuel will appreciate that we’re talking about this piece using our own websites and tagging them with our own crazy taxonomies. I’m feeling nostalgic now for the old Technorati…
When writers swap Trump for Cheeto and 45, it's not just a put-down. Removing a keyword is the anti-SEO—transforming your subject into a slippery, ungraspable, swarm.
To my experience, the phrase “bird site” was generally used as a derogatory phrase on Mastodon (represented by a Mastodon character instead of a bird), by people who were fed up by Twitter and the interactions they found there. I recall instances of it as early as April 2017.
In addition to potential SEO implications, this phenomenon is also interesting for its information theoretic implications.
I particularly like the reference in the van der Nagle paper
[…] screenshotting, or making content visible without sending its website traffic – to demonstrate users’ understandings of the algorithms that seek to connect individuals to other people, platforms, content and advertisers, and their efforts to wrest back control.
This seems like an awesome way to skirt around algorithms in social sites as well as not rewarding negative sites with clicks.