gemini://jsreed5.org/log/2023/202307/20230721-oversharing.gmi

For the last three days, once a day I've sat down with my UMPC and created an empty Gemini log file. I'd fill in the date and format all the links, then move my cursor to the body of the post. Minutes would go by, then hours. Each time I would find that I had written nothing. Eventually I'd close my editor in frustration, delete the file, and move on to other things.

Rob's Gemini Capsule has been relatively quiet this month, but it hasn't just been this month. I posted 30 fewer entries to my log over 12 months in 2022 than I did over 11 months in 2021, the year I launched the capsule. So far in 2023, every month except July has seen the same number of posts or fewer per month.

This does not correlate with a loss of interest in general for Gemini. I still browse many of the aggregators and my favorite capsule every day. I still read quite a bit, reflect on quite a bit more, and come away each day happy to have perused the discussion.

But increasingly, I feel like I have little to talk about. I don't want to flood my capsule with long, rambling posts that don't say anything. I want to weigh in on a topic when I have a strong feeling about it. And at the moment, I feel like I've already said most of what I want to say on the things I care about.

I should be happy with this. Much of Gemini's appeal for me comes from the fact that its users don't spam low-quality content all over the protocol. By only posting when I really have something to contribute, I like to think I'm contributing to that quality of discourse. But I still worry about my lack of content.

The early days of the Internet were a fertile ground for digital pioneers, just like Gemini is today. People wanted to explore the technology and the virtual space it created, staking a claim and expressing themselves within it. Personal websites--the ones that didn't just host a homepage and never see an update again--were all about sharing passions, debating ideas, and engaging in lively but ultimately civil discussion. Of course tempers flared and communities had their in-fighting, but pseudo-anonymity and a strong mental separation between the Web and the real world helped people to step away when things became too controversial.

Creating a personal site has never been easy, especially when self-hosting. Thus people only put effort into it if it meant a lot to them--and it usually only meant a lot if they were passionate about what their sites provided. That passion soon evolved into a strong desire to communicate more effectively, giving birth to Web-based discussion platforms, most notably the forum. Throughout the late '90s and early '00s, the forum, usually focusing on specific topics or group definitions, reigned supreme.

Then things changed in the late 2000s. Two things happened in the latter part of the decade: Facebook opened to the general public, and the Apple iPhone was first released. Facebook's entire revenue model as a business came from interaction between users of its platform and their consumption of ads, while the iPhone enabled people to engage with the Internet anywhere at any time. Everyone rushed to buy iPhones and use them to create and share content on Facebook.

Many more people consume content on the Internet than create it; that has always been true. But before the rose of social media and the smartphone, the people publishing works and engaging in discussions were primarily those who already wanted to do so. There was no real push to engage if you didn't want to. That changed with the emergence of Facebook and the iPhone. Suddenly people were expected to have a smartphone, even if they didn't want one. There was social pressures to have a Facebook account, even if you didn't care about it.

All that happened over 15 years ago. Now a social media presence is all but required to feel that one has any kind of visibility. The expectation is that you have an account on Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Mastodon, Bluesky, or any combination thereof, and that you use those accounts actively. People who don't are seen as the odd ones out, and even weird or off-putting.

All this pressure leads to an impulse to overshare. People are compelled to say something, anything--even if they don't know what to say. They might be apathetic or ill-informed on the topic in question; they might be too busy to think deeply about it; they might simply be sent "friendly" little notifications on their devices that Twitter "misses them" because they haven't posted in a while. And that compulsion to have something out there leads people to say things they don't mean or understand, which naturally leads to conflicts.

Corporations, especially the media, don't help in this regard. The current fad in determining the success of a product is a tool called "parrot analytics", in which marketing companies track how often people talk about or engage with the product on social media. Companies are incentivized by this metric to get social media users to engage with their brands as much as possible, even if that interaction is caustic in nature. Getting people to talk about it, even negatively, is seen as a win.

I know I shouldn't feel bad about not posting often. Some of my favorite capsules post only a few times a year. But the impulse to constantly share information has been so beaten into me by the modern Internet that I find it difficult to ignore.

The only way I see myself feeling better about it is simply accepting it. I don't have to post all the time, and that's okay. My capsule is still interesting to visit, and people still care about what I have to say, even if I don't speak often. And even if that isn't true, I can still feel good about saying something I think is valuable.

And yes: somehow I just wrote an entire post about how I have nothing to write a post about.

Oversharing

2023-07-21