LGM as Social Media
By 
I want to talk a little bit about the idea of this site as a social media network…
Blogging emerged and became prominent before social media, and while the two forms have certain similar functions I don’t think it’s correct to say that the latter evolved from the former. Facebook is not a blogging platform, even though many people write what amount to long-form essays on their pages and then expect other people to comment on those essays. The key to the functioning of Facebook is the connection, not the content, although that has changed a bit in recent years as you can follow particular Influencers without having them follow you back. I think it’s correct to call Twitter a microblogging site, although it borrowed some of its functionality from Facebook (follow an account rather than follow an RSS feed or go directly to a webpage). Twitter also mostly did away with the author-reader hierarchy by allowing everyone to essentially be an author, an innovation which sounds great in theory but that has arguably had some pretty dreadful consequences.
All of this is to say that Twitter combined some aspects of traditional blogging with social networking, which allowed it to serve some of the purposes of both. It was better at the former than at the latter, which is why Twitter killed most of the blogosphere while leaving Facebook untouched (this is not to say that Facebook is healthy, but it wasn’t killed by Twitter). And indeed when Elon began to enshittify X my own first option was the LGM comment section. One of the chief upsides of being a front pager is that you can throw out a post that’s not, in itself, much longer or more detailed than a tweet, and yet dozens to hundreds of people will comment about whatever you want them to talk about for the next several hours. My status as a heavy user of this comment section ended around 2008, but it was nevertheless a first option to pursue when X became useless.
I have since embraced Bluesky to a degree, but anyone who follows me there will know that I find the platform incredibly frustrating. I’m not sure that I’d go so far as to say that Bluesky is in the process of disintegrating itself, but all is certainly not well in that part of the social media universe. Bluesky is dominated by Resistance Libs, a group that conforms to my own ideological preferences much more tightly than X or Facebook or any other social media network I’ve ever been a part of. Unfortunately, if you say something like “I am 97% in compliance with the ideological norms of this community,” someone will start hunting for the 3% of heresy so that they can screech at you as loudly as possible.
And Bluesky has struggled to get buy in from people who either don’t conform with those ideological rules or who want to consistently speak to an audience that goes beyond Resistance Libs. It doesn’t help that some sections of Bluesky are incredibly hostile to anyone who remains on X, which is absolutely a necessity for people who expect to have broader ideological audiences or pretty much any kind of international audience at all. To be sure these folks aren’t Nazis, but at some point committed Bluesky users need to ask themselves “why do MSM journalists and Democratic Congressional staffers prefer the Nazis to us?” It’s reasonable to conclude that there’s something wrong with THEM, but it should also be cause for concern that there might be something wrong with YOU.
There’s not much point in posting anything to X anymore unless you have a VERY large following or a blue check. I no longer begrudge anyone the decision to stay and I don’t really begrudge the decision to subscribe although I do still give it the side eye. In the cold logic of ends-means rationality, I can totally understand why so many accounts that were prominent before the Change have decided to bend the knee and buy the blue check. And indeed if we were coldly rational here we’d probably use your hard-earned $$$ to subscribe all of the front pagers and the institutional account… but of course it’s not all about hard, cold rationality. Some FPers would reject the blue check. And y’all would probably get extremely upset if we did that.
But I digress. The takeaway is that the LGM comment section is a refuge from the destruction or collapse of other social media networks. Which y’all probably know because you are, after all, here. It is not free of the problems that social networking sites have, including good faith disputes that escalate out of proportion and bad faith trolls. Blocking is important on every platform and it’s important here and I know that people feel we’re arbitrary but as this is one of the longest running comment sections in the history of the blogosphere it can’t be all bad. I will say that since Disqus has been randomly blocking and unblocking people I get a LOT of e-mails from dissatisfied commenters wondering why they’ve been blocked, to which I typically respond “because Disqus is fucked up; try again tomorrow.” I almost NEVER get e-mails from folks who’ve been intentionally blocked, even though a block and a successful appeal is the only way to achieve the cherished and rare “Erik’s Chosen” medal, which tells me that the folks who get blocked here know well and good that they’ve drifted into dangerous territory.
Anyway, here’s the Page that links to all of our social media accounts, if you’re the sort of person who’s still looking for accounts to follow.
Photo Credit: By Wilgengebroed on Flickr – https://www.flickr.com/photos/wilgengebroed/5514783718/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32748496