ultimape 🐜💩 ✅ @ultimape@refactorcamp.org

While the brain dreams the narrative self is quiet and 'the elephant in the brain' dances.

#introduction

👋 Hello!

My name is Nicholas Perry, but I tend to go by my username (or as "Ape" when people let me).

I'm basically your classic trope of the absent minded professor: obsessive interests, nerdy disposition, poor social skill, and prone to strange moods.

I have an alt-account @ultimape with more details about my interests pinned.

I decided to set up a space here to interact with this community better. The local timeline on the flagship instance is too chaotic for my tastes.

mastodon.a16z.com when?

One of the weird side effects of not having a 24 hour day for me, was how when the algorithm came and shifted my feed.

I could no longer see my friends from Australia, in South Africa, in China. Their signal was drowned in the noise meant to keep me engaged on the platform.

But the cruel irony is all it did was drive me away. Frustrated that the waters I charted had become full of garbage floating in from the wake of the oil spill called growth targets.

The sailors, men & women who lived in this eddy of time, were helpless. They saw the signs of sirens and covered their ears. But the curse of SV's call was too strong.

Great songs about growth, about engagement. About how long it would take to read thru the entire feed. Trumpets about user safety, fears of hostile platform dynamics.

Once calm waters now a battleground, a minefield. Thousands left unmoored by time, drifting, drowning.

Gentrification of time, because it wasn't good for brands.

But the safety of barrier of time would not last. The algorithm came for us.

Poseidon's rage crashed up our boats. Vexing sailors of the open social seas like how Scylla and Charybdis pained Odysseus.

SS shitposts - emotional poetry and confused weeping of mermaids - could no longer find solace in the comfort of the night.

Once great feeds, carefully tended like gardens, fell to depth charges of content. Nightlife choked with algae grown in the sun, smothered in "likes are now retweets".

But this was ok. Late at night there weren't many online. The feed was slow. The content was but a trickle. The other people tweeting were likely to have the same problem I was having.

Like ships passing in the night, we signaled to each other in passing, calming the turbulent waters we shared. An implicit culture forming in the spaces sectioned off by time itself.

An aspect of the swarm carved out for safety. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0058525

Like cities whose nightlife takes on a life of its own.

I fit this mold described in those links. The grumpy Vermonter late at night.

When I'm awake at 3am in the morning I'm grumpy. Its because I've had a stressful day and I can't sleep. When my fitbit worked, my heart rate was always high. Cortisol pumped thru my veins and tensions ran amuck. Drunk on lack of sleep, my impulse control is lessened.

And I fed off the emotions in my feed. But I learned to adapt to it. To understand and expect it.

Shitposting after dark to lighten the moodscape.

I don't sync with a normal 24 hour cycle of the rest of society. My interaction shifts around the clock.

On Birdsite, being awake at 2am on a weekend was a different experience from being awake at 2am on a Wednesday. I started to "know" my social network. I could taste mood, predicting the responses I'd get.

"If you can deduce people's thoughts and emotions from what they say or do, perhaps you can detect their internal states by studying how their expressions change."
https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-diurnal-trends/

One of the interesting things about algorithmic feeds over chronological is they break down the inherent division based on time.

Conversations have a rhythm. Once you have a feel for your stream, you can taste it's mood.

"The most toxic time of day (darkest line) is 3 am—11 percent of comments are mean. The most talkative time is 9 pm (longest line), with 10,971 comments on average."
https://www.wired.com/2017/08/internet-troll-map/

It subverts people's ability to judge context of a tweet.
http://digital.vpr.net/post/making-sense-data-news-are-vermont-commenters-actually-most-toxic#stream/0

Sorry I've been quiet.

I wanna use this space when i'm refactoring neat ideas, but all I can think about lately are more vulgar insight porn or things bordering on virtue signaling and political adjacent topics.

I'm thinking my issue might be I don't have a good sense of what people following me might like to hear more of. My interests are varied, but lately they've been stuck in territories involving biological curiosities of bear penises.

Talking about that here would feel like trolling? 😅