The irony here is that modern social algorithms actively conceal these for exactly the same reason. Social feeds want to show you a steady stream of content that you are likely to engage with. They are incentivized to frame content as literally timeless and impose a continuous, never-ending present on the user, since they don't want recency to get in the way of engagement. But the time-context in which a piece of media was produced is a fairly important detail in critically evaluating it and situating it in an actual, human conversation.
Did this piece of writing with common AI smells get posted before or after 2021? Did the author write this piece about someone they admire and aspire to before or after the murders became public knowledge? What was the expert concensus on the topic when the author wrote about it? What meaning did this slang have back then?
What technologies were commonplace? He said he needs help with something I'm an expert in -- can I help him, or was it over a decade ago?
What was happening culturally when this was written? What was the weather like? Did this collection of posts with a dour tone get posted during a global pandemic when mostly everyone was self-isolating? Did he write this post about his loved one before or after her death?
I mean hopefully I don't need to sell you on why this information is useful and actually antithetical to addictive, low nuance, engagement-driven social media. We need more media literacy, not less, and de-emphasizing critical details like this seems problematic
I do sympathize with the challenge and know that there aren't really easy answers here, and every possible change is likely to ruffle someone's feathers, but I have a feeling there is another way to achieve what you're after.
Did this piece of writing with common AI smells get posted before or after 2021?
Textlog didn't exist before 2021, did it? (though you are probably making a general point)
Did the author write this piece about someone they admire and aspire to before or after the murders became public knowledge?
This is a really good point.
What was the expert consensus on the topic when the author wrote about it?
Also a really good point.
What meaning did this slang have back then?
True, but many people just don't care (unless you are talking 10 years in the future).
I'm not going to bother writing every quote-reply, but in this spirit, I wrote in another comment that I think I'm pro not having timestamps but now maybe not. I'm liking the suggestions of having very low granularity. To throw in an idea: rough labels such as: fresh, day-old, recent, this year, last year, 2/3/4/5 years ago, years old. Maybe even whole threads could become "stale" after a large amount of time, like a year. Very much spitballing here.
RE AI writing and slang, the particularities of the examples aren't so important. My point wasn't to comprehensively catalog of every instance where we're losing something by not having timestamps on textlog specifically. The point was that time -- even relative time if not timestamps -- can be used to understand a piece of content -- often they are even critical, which you get.
I like the idea of playing with granularity. I'll also suggest: one way to make timestamps available but less of a focus is to add friction. Require an extra click into a post metadata page that loads with a full page refresh. Any friction introduced reduces a feature's usage, and even as little as just adding an extra page refresh tends to be enough to reduce its usage by an order of magnitude or more. If you wanted to be particularly sadistic you could require the user download a pdf with that data lol
A solution here that I’m considering is revealing the historical information after a post has reached past a certain age. This will bring context to the post while also reduce bias on recent posts.
I do feel reluctancy answering to a post even a few hours ago thinking my answer might not be applicable to their context anymore. But not knowing, I believe keeps the conversation going for a while. I see it actually taking place.
So, what is the right thing to do here? More engagement and lack of information, or more information and less engagement? Not an easy answer.
I do feel reluctancy answering to a post even a few hours ago thinking my answer might not be applicable to their context anymore. But not knowing, I believe keeps the conversation going for a while. I see it actually taking place.
First time I hear about textlog today, seems interesting (and good to remove likes etc). But if there aren't other comments that already address whatever point I would want to make I dont care if it is 10 minutes old or 10 days old (now, 10 years might be different and probably should be different).
Maybe that is due to my background in forums focused on solving technical problems (troubleshooting, programming, etc), but even if the original poster helped by my input any longer, someone else might be even if that is years down the line, so answers are always useful.
Of course context is everything, and if it is someone talking about what they had for lunch, that is irrelevant 10 days later (but I also wouldn't be interested in that content to begin with, even if it was 10 seconds old).
So in conclusion, I think having a timestamp is useful, and definitely for older posts (but for newer posts I think you are overestimating the problems of having them).
Gotta say that I agree with @evnm's reply on the original post that timestamps are fundamental to microblogging and maintaining a timeline. I love the philosophy behind textlog but I do disagree with this particular aspect; seems like something the author of a note/post should have choice and control of.
You could have a feature that users could turn on in their profile to display if they are online or when they were last online, and have a setting to restrict it to certain times, so that other users can know if this person would respond to a post/needs response to a post. And then a "follow" feature, that just displays the timestamps for users that you "follow" in particular (because I imagine that if you follow someone you might not care about the age of their posts). Lastly, you can just have it as an option for any post "include timestamps," so that a user can let others know the temporal context of one (or all) of their posts. I think these 3 features together would solve all of the issues with timestamps while still retaining the engagement strategy you are looking for.
I'm pretty sure The Guardian (UK news website) have a dynamic image preview that says how many years ago the article was written for this reason - often old articles are reposted or recirculated by people trying to stir up drama or spread misinformation. Think of someone sharing a news article about vaccine side-effects from 2014 in 2021...
Comments
The irony here is that modern social algorithms actively conceal these for exactly the same reason. Social feeds want to show you a steady stream of content that you are likely to engage with. They are incentivized to frame content as literally timeless and impose a continuous, never-ending present on the user, since they don't want recency to get in the way of engagement. But the time-context in which a piece of media was produced is a fairly important detail in critically evaluating it and situating it in an actual, human conversation.
Did this piece of writing with common AI smells get posted before or after 2021? Did the author write this piece about someone they admire and aspire to before or after the murders became public knowledge? What was the expert concensus on the topic when the author wrote about it? What meaning did this slang have back then?
What technologies were commonplace? He said he needs help with something I'm an expert in -- can I help him, or was it over a decade ago?
What was happening culturally when this was written? What was the weather like? Did this collection of posts with a dour tone get posted during a global pandemic when mostly everyone was self-isolating? Did he write this post about his loved one before or after her death?
I mean hopefully I don't need to sell you on why this information is useful and actually antithetical to addictive, low nuance, engagement-driven social media. We need more media literacy, not less, and de-emphasizing critical details like this seems problematic
I do sympathize with the challenge and know that there aren't really easy answers here, and every possible change is likely to ruffle someone's feathers, but I have a feeling there is another way to achieve what you're after.
Textlog didn't exist before 2021, did it? (though you are probably making a general point)
This is a really good point.
Also a really good point.
True, but many people just don't care (unless you are talking 10 years in the future).
I'm not going to bother writing every quote-reply, but in this spirit, I wrote in another comment that I think I'm pro not having timestamps but now maybe not. I'm liking the suggestions of having very low granularity. To throw in an idea: rough labels such as: fresh, day-old, recent, this year, last year, 2/3/4/5 years ago, years old. Maybe even whole threads could become "stale" after a large amount of time, like a year. Very much spitballing here.
RE AI writing and slang, the particularities of the examples aren't so important. My point wasn't to comprehensively catalog of every instance where we're losing something by not having timestamps on textlog specifically. The point was that time -- even relative time if not timestamps -- can be used to understand a piece of content -- often they are even critical, which you get.
I like the idea of playing with granularity. I'll also suggest: one way to make timestamps available but less of a focus is to add friction. Require an extra click into a post metadata page that loads with a full page refresh. Any friction introduced reduces a feature's usage, and even as little as just adding an extra page refresh tends to be enough to reduce its usage by an order of magnitude or more. If you wanted to be particularly sadistic you could require the user download a pdf with that data lol
A solution here that I’m considering is revealing the historical information after a post has reached past a certain age. This will bring context to the post while also reduce bias on recent posts.
I do feel reluctancy answering to a post even a few hours ago thinking my answer might not be applicable to their context anymore. But not knowing, I believe keeps the conversation going for a while. I see it actually taking place.
So, what is the right thing to do here? More engagement and lack of information, or more information and less engagement? Not an easy answer.
First time I hear about textlog today, seems interesting (and good to remove likes etc). But if there aren't other comments that already address whatever point I would want to make I dont care if it is 10 minutes old or 10 days old (now, 10 years might be different and probably should be different).
Maybe that is due to my background in forums focused on solving technical problems (troubleshooting, programming, etc), but even if the original poster helped by my input any longer, someone else might be even if that is years down the line, so answers are always useful.
Of course context is everything, and if it is someone talking about what they had for lunch, that is irrelevant 10 days later (but I also wouldn't be interested in that content to begin with, even if it was 10 seconds old).
So in conclusion, I think having a timestamp is useful, and definitely for older posts (but for newer posts I think you are overestimating the problems of having them).
Gotta say that I agree with @evnm's reply on the original post that timestamps are fundamental to microblogging and maintaining a timeline. I love the philosophy behind textlog but I do disagree with this particular aspect; seems like something the author of a note/post should have choice and control of.
Less granularity could be a middle ground.
Show the date but not h/m/s.
You could have a feature that users could turn on in their profile to display if they are online or when they were last online, and have a setting to restrict it to certain times, so that other users can know if this person would respond to a post/needs response to a post. And then a "follow" feature, that just displays the timestamps for users that you "follow" in particular (because I imagine that if you follow someone you might not care about the age of their posts). Lastly, you can just have it as an option for any post "include timestamps," so that a user can let others know the temporal context of one (or all) of their posts. I think these 3 features together would solve all of the issues with timestamps while still retaining the engagement strategy you are looking for.
I'm pretty sure The Guardian (UK news website) have a dynamic image preview that says how many years ago the article was written for this reason - often old articles are reposted or recirculated by people trying to stir up drama or spread misinformation. Think of someone sharing a news article about vaccine side-effects from 2014 in 2021...