Blogchains and hyperconversations

I don't really [[like likes]]. On the big silos of the social industry they have become weaponised; a kind of social Taylorism, where the craft of building social relationships has been reduced to unskilled labour - just another way of automating us.

Even on the open web, where they are not designed to distract, likes are still a bit of a weak form of interaction. I think they have their place, but I want something a bit more. Something more than comments below a post, too. They're a bit constrained - in hock to the main body of text above.

Blogchains

I came across the idea of [[blogchains]] the other day, on Tom Critchlow's blog I believe. The word is from Venkatesh Rao, and the very tl;dr is that it's a string of short, ad-hoc blog posts that build on a theme. That's cool, and tied in with a wiki is kind of how I see me builing up ideas over time.

But where the idea gets really interesting (for me) is when it extends to cross-site blogchains and open blogchains. These are more open-ended, involving two or more people conversing and building on a theme, simply by posting to their blog about it and linking the posts together. Kind of a webring, but for posts rather than sites.

There's definitely something to be said for the long-form, turn-based conversation. One of the best conversations I have had recently was a long email chain. And some of the thoughts that have stuck with me the most are ones I've written as a long reply to someone else's open question or musings on a topic.

Hyperconversations

The blogchain thing reminded me of something Kicks wrote about a few months back - hyperconversations. It's a chat between friends, conducted across blogs and wikis. Less formal than a blogchain - no predetermined theme.

It’s very informal and fluid. It’s completely simple: just leaving messages for each other on our sites.

– The Hyperchat Modality

Conversations that last

I think what they're both getting at, is using [[social software]] to have distributed conversations that last more than just an hour or two.

Chris wrote about the temporality of social media.

Taking this a level deeper, social is thereby forcing us to not only think shallowly, but to make our shared histories completely valueless.

Shallow conversations disappear off the timeline pretty quickly. As mentioned, I don't think this is true just for Twitter and Facebook though. It's more a problem of the medium.

Relatedly, contemporary fediverse interfaces borrow from surveillance-capitalism based popular social networks by focusing on breadth of relationships rather than depth. […] What if instead of focusing on how many people we can connect to we instead focused on the depth of our relationships?

– Spritely: towards secure social spaces as virtual worlds

Not to rag on likes and reposts too much. I do them plenty. There's a time and place for everything. And I'm not saying that I want to have to sit down and write a 500 word blog post every time I want to say hi to a friend. But! I would definitely like some more conversations that last.

So who's up for a blogchain, or a hyperconversation?