Micro
More on Mu
So what is Mu? In the past couple posts I’ve highlighted the broken nature of big tech, social media, etc. and our role in that.
Now I want to highlight where we need to go next. Over the years we’ve seen a number of Twitter clones and we’ve also seen the evolution of various platforms to include short blogging as a format because what we’ve realised is, this is the correct format for updates and breaking news. But that’s not to say it’s the way in which everyone should share content or that it doesn’t need some guardrails.
What I propose is rather than starting with the blogging aspect, we actually begin with all the other relevant content e.g the news. When I started using Twitter in 2009, initially I was a little skeptical, for the 2 years prior Twitter was something of a joke. It didn’t really offer much value until I saw something very clear, people who would normally share a blog post every 6 months would be posting more frequently on updates about what they were working on e.g Zed Shaw at the time was working on Mongrel 2, and these updates on Twitter were sort of a fascinating shift in an ability to see what was happening in the techsphere. We definitely need more of that.
But what we need less of is the totally useless opinions or trolling commentary about things people have absolutely no business speaking of. Everyone has an opinion on politics these days, especially VCs. Ok they have money, but they feel like an entitled group who’s opinion should be heard. I’m not saying anyone should hear my opinion either, but I don’t need to hear about what these people think about world governance. This is why I’m not on X. And the same goes for marketing spiel on LinkedIn, I don’t need that, I don’t to be sold something by people. And it’s not clear what’s being sold. It’s as if everyone has to voice their opinion to seek out validation for something. WE don’t need this. WE need less of this. What we do need is news and updates. We need to know what’s going on in the world and we need it in a factual basis. WE need the sharing and dissemination of knowledge in a way that’s beneficial to mankind, not tearing down people with falsehood. If you don’t like something, that’s fine, but better to keep it to yourself that drive animosity between different groups of people. That’s what X is now. It’s just a platform for ragebait and on the otherside, speculation over various new forms of made up assets like crypto perps. Otherwise there was a time we were using it for world news updates.
So I propose we get back to the news by delivering real news from real news outlets. I also think markets matter and knowing what’s generally happening in markets without speculation is useful. So just daily prices for things, so as not to be ignorant of it. And then further to that what’s vitally important is having a long term connection with God and his word. You’ll see in the screenshot, the Reminder is always there. It’s always there to remind you, there’s more than what you’re staring at. That this life has purpose.
Discussions, opinions, blogging. All of that can come later. Firstly I propose getting back to real news without commentary. Then secondly building some way of discussing these topics alongside a moderating AI that can keep a discussion inline, without slander.
Beyond this, I think there’s then merit to reintroducing micro blogging but without likes or retweets, without subposts, without comments and more importantly, without being able to post less than 140 characters. I don’t think this did anyone any favours. By being able to say less, people basically raged any thought they had, or attempted to create material purely for engagement. That shouldn’t be the purpose of communciation tools. If it’s really a medium for breaking news and broadcasts, then it needs to be used in an effective way.
It’s not clear that Bluesky, Threads, or any other new entrant is actually dealing with the deficiency’s of X/Twitter, in fact they want to perpuate the most vain and useless parts of it, meaning driving engagement and addiction. We need to focus on the tooling aspect, not allowing people to hurt themselves or others. I think there’s a lot more that can be clarified on this but something for later.
As mentioned previously, I’m working on a prototype, if anyone wants to get involved or get access email me at asim@micro.mu.