Just another post to paid subscribers of what’s been on my mind the past couple of days.
While the community of “people who work in data” was never a monolithic thing that you could point to, there had always been outsized clusters that people referenced. “Data Twitter” was one of the bigger collections of the many overlapping communties that represented the space. But there were also the people on data-related subreddits, as well as clusters of folk on LinkedIn. There are even “influencers” on YouTube. There continue to be various Slack channels and Discord servers and who knows what else.
But 2023 seems to be the year for the implosion of social networks. Twitter has of course has been hitting new heights of irrelevancy thanks to current mismanagement. I do occasionally pop on to see data folk chatting on there but it is a ghost of its former self. Data-Mastodon appears to be struggling to be a thing, with a lot of the major shitposters who made Data Twitter fun not using it because Mastodon’s vibe is definitely Very Stodgy and Very Serious.
In the past few weeks. Reddit’s CEO has decided that Twitter shouldn’t have a monopoly on top-down mismanagement of social networks, so they’re in the merry process of going to war with their own userbase. I’m sure that’ll go over well. But in the event that Reddit becomes a ghost of its former self because the users revolt, we’re going to lose yet another touchpoint for a data community that’s already drifting into separate little islands when Twitter’s problems started.
The overall effect on me is that I’ve been seeing, and ultimately interacting, with fewer data people in the past few months. If anything, the deepest connections seem to be from reading the newsletters of other data folk these days — which means I really should subscribe to a few more.
One side effect that I wasn’t expecting (but should have predicted) is that the increased social decohesion has made it so information sharing networks seems to be getting weaker. The first thing that put this idea into my head was when I noticed that new subscriptions to this newsletter have gone on a bit of a taper. Part of that is likely because I haven’t written something that is viral-worthy, but it’s also possible that sharing networks are weaker now than a year ago.
For the longest time, people just slowly trickle in for various reasons. The year-on-year growth has just been trending downwards over time.
I certainly don’t think my little newsletter here is some representative sample of the actual behavior of the data community, nor do I think my writing is the sort that attracts hordes of followers every day. But I do make social media posts whenever a new post goes up and the effectiveness of that advertising seems to have gotten weaker as things progress.
It’s gonna be a weird time
The data science and adjacent communities have definitely benefitted greatly from the huge social media centralization boom of the 2010s. A few platforms hit that critical mass of users that balanced ease of discoverability and sharing, with ease of varying modes of interaction. We’re in the middle of watching it crumble to a shadow of its former glory within the span of a couple of years.
I’ve joked on occasion that we’re going to go back to a dark era where we’re going to have to reinvent the modern equivalent of the webring because SEO is so broken nowadays. We might also have to gather in a phpBB-powered forum somewhere to keep the community going. If Slack or Discord pull weird community-breaking shenanigans, we might also have to re-learn how to use IRC.
At this point, I really don’t think a clear winner replacement will appear any time soon. Even if someone spun up a forum somewhere, they’re not going to convince enough people to join for it to matter. The pendulum of change is fully swinging towards decentralization for a couple of years.
For the time being, we’re going to have to individual maintain connections with folk we want to hear and interact with on a constellation of platforms. It’s like living in the early 2000s again, except we’ve become so accustomed to the dynamics of “go to one place and browse all the communities you want” that living in a fragmented web is going to feel horrible.
I almost think it would be funny to spin up a phpBB forum for data science somewhere. I don’t expect it to get actual traction, so I haven’t bothered with it, but it would almost be enough for a meme. If someone goes to the trouble of making one, let me know!
I feel like it's time for RSS to shine once again.