People who’ve stayed active on Twitter seem to be ones who have something to promote that’s high-stakes for them (career, hustle…)

People with primarily social, shitpost, or think-aloud motives seem to have mostly left. Where that activity remains on twitter, it’s promotion in disguise or politically musky

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

Reach is only valuable to the degree you have something to promote. I miss some reply conversations but care surprising little about “stranded reach assets.” I go through the motions of sharing links there, but really don’t have enough at stake to care about my reach there (58k).

There is a metric that’s not quite reach but something like size of serendipity surface that’s a function of reach and feed algorithm.  S=f(R,FA).

Frequency with which surprising connections are made, unexpected insights are surfaced, weird options open up.

This function has been weakening drastically on twitter

Political homogeneity kills S. Holding raw reach R and feed algorithm FA constant, serendipity yield is a function of a) diversity b) genuine conversation (as opposed to Bernean games and mutually reinforcing derp)

In reply threads I see now, both have plummeted. It is now very similar people derping (and promoting)

In hindsight the wordcel/shape rotator meme was the first sign of what was to come. That was really a proxy culture war between those who value serendipity more vs those who value power more. 

“Shape rotator” had less to do with any natural aptitude for high-dimensional geometry than agency/power above all.

The default shape rotator attitude is the one in the Good, Bad, Ugly scene where a guy out for revenge corners Ugly (Tuco) in the bathtub and starts making a big speech. Tuco hears him out a bit then shoots him with a gun he’s been holding underwater, with the line “if you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk.”

It is interesting that shape rotator types vastly prefer to approach conversation as combative pitched-battle “debate.” If that’s not possible because cowardly opponents are avoiding it, they prefer the “shoot your shot” high-risk one-shot gamble drawn from pitch cultures and cold approach dating.

It’s interesting that many startup people gravitate to this mode. Pitch as in deck has shared roots with pitch as in pitched battle. Honor warfare among ceremonially arrayed knights. In this kind of culture, “strategy” is cowardice. You win through honorable and evenly matched 1:1 (winning = favor of gods)

Certain kinds of clever cheating in the spirit of the divine meta-game are honorable (cf Homo Ludens) but strategy in the sense of total war conducted through maneuvering and stealth where ends matter more than means is dishonorable. When they do it themselves they are ashamed enough they hide it a bit.

Serendipity kinda requires an entirely different mindset. One based on improv, yes-and play. Not honor warfare, pitched battles, or trash talk. It’s not that shape rotator types are incapable of this, they just restrict it to people with whom they have already established trust. Not as a means of building trust.

Ie in old twitter improv banter was for making new friends. In X, it’s for hanging out with friends you already have.

You can tell when you’re on the receiving end. Some people will be cold to you but suddenly decide you’re trustworthy and switch to improv banter. Often with an explicit “you’re a good guy”

This is great for insular tribe building but NOT for serendipity. Serendipity requires an ongoing encounter with the familiar. When you reserve improv banter only for familiar friends, you might enjoy good times and partying but you’re not going to experience much serendipity.

Most of the serendipity in my life occurred on the boundary between familiar and unfamiliar.

It’s okay to not value this much. If you seek power, often all you need is ONE seed of serendipity to bet on. Then you just build your tribe and double down hard. Build your empire of power with very little “path serendipity” simply by pouring copious resources into it.

This is partly why serious strategy is viewed as dishonorable (strategy theater is valued). In some ways the essence of strategy in the tradition of Sun Tzu to Boyd is antithetical to impressive deployments of vast resources and building up of power for the sake of power.

The well-recognized elements: unfair advantages, avoiding conflict without a decisive advantage and element of surprise, winning without firing a shot, winning hearts and minds, letting positioning do all the work and avoiding melees… it’s all the mark of cowardly wordcel weasliness.

Again, it’s not that they’re incapable of it. They’re *ashamed* of it. In fact the mark of true strategy is probably that “honorable” warriors would be ashamed of pursuing it. Not incapable of conceiving, understanding, or executing it.

Musk apologists like to pretend that it’s merely one kind of homogeneity replacing another and that what existed before was some sort of woke newspeak theater. This is simply not true. It really was a very broad discourse. 

One reason for this is acknowledged by the apologists themselves: simply valuing words less.