Feiertag in Bayern. Auch nach zehn Jahren (OMG ZEHN JAHRE) Bayern freue ich mich als Niedersächsin immer noch über alle Tage, an denen Jesus oder Maria irgendwas gemacht haben. Wir hatten ja nichts, nicht mal Feiertage.

Ich merke allerdings auch nach zehn Jahren (OMG ZEHN JAHRE), dass ich öfter Heimweh nach dem Norden habe als früher. Daher musste ich in diesem Etsy-Shop ein winziges bisschen Geld lassen.

Gestern buk ich Brownies nach dem guten alten butterreichen Rezept und schlug wie immer Zucker und Eier schaumig auf, bevor der Rest der Zutaten dazukam, anstatt alles in die aufgelöste Butter zu kippen. Dadurch werden die Brownies deutlich luftiger als klietschig, was ich sehr gerne mag. (Ich nehme inzwischen deutlich weniger Zucker, schmeckt auch.)

Außerdem spülte mir Instagram ein Rezept mit Lauch von Herrn Ottolenghi in die Timeline, das hervorragend passte, weil ratet was am Freitag in der Biokiste war. Ich hatte nicht alle Kräuter im Haus und unfassbarerweise auch keine Sahne – die hatte ich nämlich letzte Woche in charmanter norddeutscher Gesellschaft in Ostfriesentee gekippt. Daher gab es bei mir Joghurt und Tahini zum Dippen, was auch prima passte. Rezept wird noch verbloggt, das ist, glaube ich, hinter der Paywall. (Wenn sich irgendeines meiner Online-Abos lohnt, dann das für NYT Cooking.)

Den Rest des freien Tags trieb ich mich parallel auf Twitter und Mastodon rum, was mich schon nach wenigen Stunden überforderte. Mein Kopf ist übervoll, ich muss mal wieder etwas ändern. Ich weiß nur noch nicht was. Erste Idee war, mehr auf TikTok zu lurken, denn da folge ich hauptsächlich Menschen, die Blumen hübsch arrangieren oder ihre Wohnung aufräumen, was mein persönliches ASMR ist, aber sowas von.

Ich glaube, dieses gute Interview steckt leider auch hinter der Paywall: „How to Leave an Internet That’s Always in Crisis.“

Charlie Warzel sprach im Juli 2022 mit Kate Lindsay, beide vom Atlantic. Sie hat sich von Twitter und Insta verabschiedet und ist nur noch auf TikTok. Ich fand einige ihrer Aussagen sehr treffend und copypaste daher mal:

„[Twitter is a source of] a lot of my social anxiety, and it was, very unfortunately, a huge part of my life and how I feel about my work. I felt like I couldn’t leave it because of my job—that leaving it was committing career suicide. But being on it actively made me feel bad.

The way I was able to get off of it was less about social media and more about changing my attitude toward work. And coming to the — it doesn’t sound revolutionary — conclusion that my happiness is more important than my career. And that having a career that feels impressive doesn’t matter if I’m not enjoying myself. I always knew this but never committed. I’d take a month off Twitter or Instagram, but always thinking I’d come back. I always remember how quiet my brain felt. How nice it was. But then somehow convinced myself this wouldn’t work for me. […]

I think there’s something also to our plugging into this constant stream of horrific news with commentary attached. It was too much for me to be able to respond to productively. I think Twitter especially is a machine for overwhelming you. It was making me feel hopeless by shining a light on every problem in the world, very few of which I can actually impact. My brain sees this information and tries to go into fixing mode, but I can’t do much. So I feel out of control. […]

But it’s not just Twitter. Instagram was really hard for me. Instagram Stories, particularly. With Instagram there was the idea that my life is constantly available for perception and evaluation by other people. […] It infiltrated all these other corners of my life, too. I make pottery and I’d finish it out of the kiln, but it doesn’t feel done until I put it on my Instagram. I’ll make this thing from scratch and have this wonderful, meditative experience doing it, but if I don’t share it with this feed, part of my brain will think, What is the point? It’s so bad and dumb.“

Den Punkt kann ich leider nachvollziehen – manchmal fühlt sich mein Essen nicht vollständig an, weil es nicht gut genug aussieht, um es auf Insta zu posten. Völlig bescheuert.

Warzel schreibt in seinem neuesten Newsletter beim Atlantic darüber, dass Social Media nicht stirbt, aber sich – logischerweise, wie alles – verändert: „Welcome to Geriatric Social Media.“

„Platform decay on Facebook continues apace; one year ago, in the first post of this newsletter, I compared a lot of what’s happening on Facebook to the vast wasteland of daytime TV. Twitter is full of non-Musk-related bad news, the most notable being that sports and entertainment content are waning in popularity on the platform while crypto and pornographic content are the platform’s fastest-growing categories. (Moral judgements aside, historically, it is usually a grim sign for platforms when they become disproportionately flooded by pornography and get-rich-quick material.) Similarly, places like Instagram feel a bit scuzzier lately. It’s anecdotal, but my feed and the feeds of people I talk to are so overrun with algorithmically recommended “related content” these days that you have to work a bit to find your friends in the morass. […]

There are a few things that I think are probably going on, instead. The first is that some platforms just have a natural network decay. Facebook was, at first, novel and exclusive (I got an invite from a friend who was in college! Very exciting!). Then, it grew and took on a different kind of utility (you could find all kinds of people on it from your past, or whom you met at a party!). Soon, every human you knew was on it, and, overnight, it morphed into a lot of people’s main news source. The loudest, angriest people—many of whom didn’t quite understand how to talk to people online—made it an unpleasant place to be, so a lot of people left or stopped engaging, and the loudest voices got louder. The same thing is happening on Twitter. […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about this line from Ezra Klein about Elon Musk regarding Twitter. The gist is that Musk is the ultimate player of the game of Twitter, and now he’s purchased the arcade. “He will have won the game,” Klein writes. “And nothing loses its luster quite like a game that has been beaten.” Now, only one person gets to buy Twitter, but I think everyone feels a bit of that loss of luster. We log on to our platforms, and we essentially know what everyone’s going to say and do. […]

Now, if your platform is in good health, with a vibrant, creative user base, and your recommendation algorithms do a good job of quickly assessing your users’ preferences, then it might work out for you. But if your user base is slowly atrophying due to the network decay I described above, or if your algorithms are pretty mediocre at understanding what your users like, your platform will start to feel a bit like a mall where all the stores have been replaced by weird cellphone-case kiosks. […]

Those who stay on will do so because they have meaningful relationships there or because it’s still useful for their career or, worse, because they’re still captured by the same attentional incentives and outrages of the Trump era and don’t want (or know how) to quit them. Call it Geriatric Social Media. (It feels especially right, using this moniker, that Twitter’s new owner is a 51-year-old who traffics in dusty, overused memes and likes to talk about how nobody can do real comedy anymore.)“