When Elon Musk bought Twitter, some of us hoped that he would have something brilliant to contribute to the problem of social networks that have become cesspools of hate speech, angry and mean comments, and collections of folks who just want to shout each other down. I’m still hopeful that Elon’s smarter than we are aware and actually has something to contribute here, but I’ve become more and more despondent about the possibility of actual change.

I’ve been using social networking since it exists. Page through this blog and you’ll see that I’m one of the early adopters of what are now the major social networking platforms and a few that didn’t make it. I tend to join the new ones when they surface as well (Mastadon, Post.News, Substack, etc.) just to see what they have that the others don’t.

So far I’m just disappointed. Unfortunately, when Peter Steiner drew the above cartoon in 1993, he was spot on.

My first significant experiences with social communications on the Internet was via USENET. I participated in a bunch of different newsgroup and was amazed at the diversity of topics and membership. I recall being particular enamored with the groups discussing Jewish topics – Torah, Jewish law, etc. I pointed these groups out to Jack Moline, the rabbi of our synagogue (and someone now quite well known), who played around in them for a while. Eventually he came back to me and said that he wasn’t going to continue reading or commenting in the newsgroups because the discourse always ended up being disrespectful and impolite.

There’s something significant lost when we “talk” online. We say things that we wouldn’t ordinarily say to someone’s face. And, often, we can take comfort in anonymity and distance when making distasteful remarks. As Steiner pointed out, nobody knows you’re a dog on the Internet.

That’s Twitter today. I don’t have any solutions to this problem but it is “the problem” to solve if we expect Twitter to be useful as a place to share ideas and have thoughtful discussions and conversations. Maybe we need something like “stakes” – things that are at personal risk which penalize bad behavior. In the real world, this is your face, your identity, your job, your home – you don’t say or do things that create risk for these things. Platform content moderation doesn’t quite do this; maybe it’s just better community reputation building (like Stack Overflow). But something needs to change unless we just want these platforms to be just like Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park – a place where someone can say whatever they want, without repercussion, in a place where no one really wants to listen.

PS. As a side note, I started looking at who is writing on post.news. I searched for topics that are interesting to me, looked at the posts, and then had to spend some time figuring out who the posters were. It’d sure be nice to have those “stakes” I mentioned readily available so I can evaluate the poster not just on the immediate comment they are making but also on their history and agenda.

When I first started my website way back in 1996, I had this image as the centerpiece of the page. Back then, there was no WordPress or SubStack or such so if you were a “blogger”, you just edited a bunch of HTML. (WordPress showed up in 2003). Back then, I still owned the k2.com domain and used it for my consulting side-hustle and a blog. But that’s another story – this one is about the image

The name of the image is Iceworld, created by the artist Ron Cobb (also here on Wikipedia and on Lambiek). It is an example of pixel art, a piece of artwork painstakingly created a pixel at a time. According to this subreddit, the image was originally called ICEWORLD.GIF and was created around 1990 so the tools to do this would have been quite limited. One of the comments suggests that it might have been done with PixelPaint, which came out around the right time for Cobb to do this piece.

In later years, after I had moved my blog over to WordPress, I extracted the iceman from the image and used it for the blog header. You can also see on the left how I sort of crafted my own, very weak version of the ice man to go along with the domain name and when I sold k2.com, I redid the upper left logo with the jeffreykay.com.

Probably the most disappointing thing in this story is that I never credited Ron Cobb for the image. I’m pretty sure at the time I had no idea who created it and the tools for discovery on the Internet were not nearly as good as they are today. I have no idea where I even found the image. And given the wild West that was the Internet, no one cared about copyright infringement, fair use, and things like that (if you look at the archives of this blog, you’ll see all sorts of things posted about this, mostly in the context of music sharing). So at long last, now that the Iceworld image has been retired and replaced with one of my own (the image of the Hoover dam is one of my own photos), here’s my thanks to Ron Cobb for an inspirational piece of artwork.

I’ve been waiting for this.  Need I say more?