Discours.es

Warren Ellis is such a good writer/commentator:

Dinner last night with a friend who’s left Twitter but fondly remembers it as a place where he met people, people introduced themselves to him, struck up actual conversation, had social value.  He’s been off Twitter a while… This morning, I see my acquaintance Boris Anthony argue that Twitter should “go algo” like Facebook and let the system determine what you see.

While I doubt that my own Twitter and Facebook experiences were/are general, I have periods of fascination with the way social media systems eventually failed me… I wonder if attempts at inclusion by algorithm aren’t just locking people in soundproofed boxes.

These are all part-formed thoughts I’m working through, but it strikes me this morning that Twitter going algo would break a (perhaps unspoken) promise made in an earlier age of the internet: that, like FB, it would become a heavily managed means of communication, with arcane rules of entry, that would have its own opinions on whether you get to speak or listen.