Rich and Strange Aeons

The core insight here comes from a friend of mine, but he made it in a protected Facebook post, so I can't link to it.

Twitter's essence: replies/comments are posts. Which are easily shareable.

(Or in programming language parlance, Twitter has "first class" comments.)

Let me explain. Consider this Dreamwidth post that you are reading right now. It is a Post. People may or may not leave Comments; if they do, those are very much comments on *this* post.

You can easily see all of my posts, but you cannot easily find the comments that I have made, on my own or on other people's posts.

Any comments on my post are in my power; I can delete them. This means I can curate discussion, and kick out trolls; but it also means I can destroy content. When various people left Livejournal and deleted their accounts, they also destroyed whole communities of insightful and creative discussion that they did not create.

If you want to share some insightful comment... well, to be fair, that's not much different than sharing a post on Dreamwidth: you'd grab the URL, and make a post of your own on your journal. This is also an aspect of the UI: Dreamwidth simply doesn't have easy options for 'sharing'.

Most other social media I'm familiar with are similar, with tweaks. Facebook makes it easy to share posts, but not comments, and unlike Dreamwidth, whether you can get a reliable URL to a nested comment is rather doubtful. Youtube comments can be equally hard to link to, and comments are *very* different in nature from the videos they're appended to. And in both cases, comments are in the power of the post owner. Independent blogs? Similar to Dreamwidth, but with a better excuse for destroying comments (since the blog owner is actually paying for the hosting.) And with all of those, you can't find all the comments someone has made.

Also, really nested discussions tend to get clunky, probably flattened by the software at some depth, and/or losing the ability to reply directly to comments.

But Twitter? Every reply to a Tweet is itself a Tweet, which can be shared just as easily as the original Tweet, and which belongs to the Tweeter (and, ultimately, to Twitter, of course.) If someone says something notably clever, insightful, or appallingly stupid, it can blow up socially, no matter how 'nested' it might be in the discussion. If someone deletes their Tweets or account, that doesn't erase anyone else's content (though it might erase their context.) Finding someone's comments is simply finding their Tweets from their profile (though Twitter does distinguish between 'Tweets' and 'Tweets and replies' views.) And discussions can flow on no matter how 'nested' they get. (Though there's a conservation of clunkiness: you can follow a deep branch pretty easily, but navigating the 'tree' of discussion is another matter.)

Blogs are one-to-many, where the many can talk back to the one and chat among each other in the one's space. Most social media are a linkable community of one-to-many, where the commenter here can be a poster there, but each space is still one-to-many. Twitter is kind of many-to-many, a sea of nearly equivalent post-comments.

The differences can be good and bad. Bad in the lack of curation, and easy spread of misinformation; good in 'owning' your comments, and in easy organization that can't be blocked or destroyed by one person changing their mind (other than Twitter itself.) The fluidity reminds me somewhat of Usenet and mailing lists, and email does have something of the same virality: if someone makes a comment I want to share, it's just as easy to forward that comment email as a 'post' email, even to other mailing lists. Though those don't have the same discoverability as Twitter tags and trends and profiles.

So in Jan 2010 (!!) I did this vague meme
http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/214293.html
I figured I'd do a retake, noting that some recently-seen characters will have faded over time. Also, I'm going to pin it down to "favorite characters, or those who made a personal impression", without worrying about awesomeness vs. woobieness. This may change as I do the list...

...okay, yeah, it's a mix of favorites, and those who made enough of an impression that I remember their name but don't think they're lame, or don't remember their name but still think the character left a deep impression. E.g. I wasn't sure of Anri's name from Durarara, or Nice's, or the Alchemical Exalt in Keychain, but I remember *them*. I remember Mikuru from Suzumiya, but she's a moe-blob by design, so not listed. Cleppety isn't huge on my brain, but she's an important part of the book, she's a good person, and I remember her name without effort. Diziet Sma is kind of lame in my memory, but actually remembering the name of a Culture character is kind of impressive for me. The main character of Roswell should be here... but I've forgotten her name, and looking up feels like cheating... okay, I got her first name on my own, good enough. There's various webcomic characters I could name, but when I'm actively reading the comic I veto a lot of them.

A somewhat arbitrary criterion overall, but more focused for my purposes. Sort of "how many non-lame female characters can you recall without trying too hard?" Of course, I started with my old list, so kind of cheating, but I took out a few whom I feel I might not have thought to include.


( cut? duh )

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