Hello, friends who're just finding this blog. It's funny that, after all this time dithering and missing LJ, I've just gone and YOLO'd into posting my most intimate personal life for anyone who hasn't got the foresight to look away. ;)
I've lived in San Francisco for six months now. And... I didn't think this was likely, but I'm more cut off from folks than ever. I started thinking about it - I see that friends are gathering, I see that things are happening, but I have no idea when or why. (There are also a lot of events I see happen at which I feel unwelcome, but that's another story entirely.)
Some time in the last month, Facebook or Google discontinued the FB-Events-feed-to-Gcal integration. Is it a bug? A Product choice to make people look at the Events page, thus increasing DAU (daily active users, for those of you so blessed as to not have to think about these things)? Since the feed apparently still works with iCal, is it some sort of competitive maneuvering between Google and FB? All three? Possibly. But the end result is the same - I no longer know what's going on, and it's made me take a hard look at the infrastructure of my social life.
Years ago, we used to plan our lives on Yahoo Calendar. These days it's GCal. Evites went out by email, and we added them laboriously to our To Do lists. Blogs were written, invitations to those who found them. Parties were had.
Now, we have better technology (automatic add-to-calendar! feeds of events!) and yet the experience is so much worse. Why? Ads have broken the internet.
Spammers are ruining email. (Spammers send ads on an incredible scale for marginal return, but since the services are "free" and the tools are easy to come by, they're happy to hydraulic mine the virtual world.) An acquaintance of mine maintained a Google Group for mailing invitations to her (very popular) annual event (she'd outgrown the threshold where she could use her normal email client), but at some point she ran up against the limits for spam reputation scoring. She'd send the invitation, and suddenly her account would be locked down (rate limited). Only a third of the emails would be delivered (SMTP ban). In the end, she split the invitations into more groups that were below the "bulk email" threshold - but like so many of us in the small-Silicon-Valley, she has more than two thousand friends (including partners and plus ones) who'd be welcome at this party. Last I heard she was considering a newsletter service like MailChimp to get around how we've broken email.
What about commercial invitation services, like Evite? Evite is clearly struggling to monetize - they need clickthrough on their emails to make sure that they get their ads served, and so the "invitation" is now an envelope, which you must click, and then click again, and then a third time (three pages of ads!) in order to read the details and RSVP. If there's an "export to calendar" link I haven't yet found it. And this explains why, in an age when, when making a dinner reservation I automatically have it on my Gcal in seconds, and when my partner's arrival gate is on the calendar minutes from their plan touching down, Evite, Green Envelope, and other commercial services will never add this convenience feature. Which means that in the deluge of email, if I miss one that contains an invite, I'm effectively not invited to that party. (There are of course edge cases with spammers sending Evites to think about... but guh.)
There are Public Gcals, but nobody has time for that, somehow. There are RSS feeds, but it seems like since the death of Google Reader, so few people are actually willing to shell out a few bucks to maintain continuity of feed.
No, let's call it what it is - integrity of feed. When companies started dicking with the chronological order of information in order to show more ads, they broke... everything. We've got dark patterns, corporate skullduggery, and human suffering as a result.
So now we come to Facebook Events, and why I don't like to use them.
Facebook events are subject to The Algorithm. I noticed this the second time I tried to host a birthday party - Only about 1/3 of the list was actually shown the event. You can imagine how that felt. And yet I tried a few times to host birthdays this way - at one point I had thirty people RSVP and six show up. Two years ago, three people. Last year, none but my partner. So this year I messaged some people who were local, and who wouldn't be too put out, and I put an event on my Gcal and I invited the eight of them *by email*. It was the best birthday in years.* At some point I can't blame this on having shitty friends (though there's literally a meme about "The San Francisco RSVP") but on algorithmic meddling.
I also work with a few groups who put on semi-professional events, and I've seen where the Algorithm gets its hooks in to monetize. "That's a lovely event invitation you have there. It's a shame if something were to... happen to it. Maybe you'd like to buy some... ahem... insurance for it? Say like $5 in promotion? Look how many more people will see it!" That works for the first event, but the next event it's $8, and then at some point it's $20 and the service says "Oh huh, you should just get a monthly subscription to promotion services! It'll save you money!" Not today, Satan. Every single person on our list is here because they specifically signed up, and you're holding our audience hostage?
In the end, most of these groups I've recommended get... a email newsletter service like MailChimp, so that we know that the people who want our notes actually get them.
It's interesting, because post-Tumblrgeddeon, Patreon is also building what's essentially a cul-de-sac, walled-garden shadow RSS service. I should also mention that post-Tumblrgeddeon, I *miss* seeing content (however inane) from my friends, and knowing that they're out there.**
So here's my request to you - email me.
Let's go low(er)-tech for a bit. We'll start a conversation, and I'll invite you to things. No ads need be involved.
(* Modulo some health stuff which I haven't blogged about.)
(** Though if I can't tell your posts from sales pitches, it's not "friend" content. That's a blog for another-'nother time.)
