This roller coaster is speeding up. Usually it doesn't work that way because we are always losing energy. You have to burn a lot to keep going faster. Alas, the waste heat goes somewhere...
Thanks for reading n commenting CK! -- I am an optimist and spent a lot of time in my work around stuff I now question. My first impulse is my thoughts are just a product of getting older 😊 I wrote a post long ago titled The Trifecta. There will always be stuff to worry about
Enjoyed the video very powerful. As you know I write about issues of climate change and for the most part I believe we are really in the soup now on terms of 'fixing' the pending ravages of climate change. But evolution has its cycles and being aware of what needs to happen and what needs to be nurtured and kept is an awareness that Aboriginal people held sacred.
Glad to see you back and writing in the Substack world. Notes haven't affected me I guess as I don't see them unless I go looking for them. And at this point I'm not interested in looking for them. lol
Thanks for checking in! I enjoyed writing this one -- fun to put something together again . It is interesting that most of the post was about something else (~75%) but lots of comments about Notes! It is definitely on people's minds. For me I just decided I would allot a certain amount of time to Substack each week. If I cannot keep to the schedule I will read less. More time for family, activities, and book reading! It will be interesting after four weeks I will rightsize how the time gets spent.
I love this essay, Mark! Brilliantly written and distilled, I love the clock analogies which are really visual, and the list of THT qualities feel right on! I'm short-term pessimistic but long-term optimistic on climate change: we can't fix it, but we can mitigate and recover with strong enough will and innovation (combined). We need to stop doing what got us here, and start doing other things instead!
Thanks for your kind words Stephanie. When I started crunching the numbers to a time of day, it seemed wrong and even depressing. It is definitely easy to become pessimistic for the scale of the challenges but we've never had better tools. I fear human tendencies are the wildcard. I think the program you introduced me to has changed my perspective a bit and opened my eyes to things I had not considered before.
I think it's too late to reverse climate change - it's happening right now. The black flies came out about three weeks early and are pretty much done at this point - they generally are out by mid May and gone by mid June. Yeah, I know, who cares, they're evil, bloodsucking insects, but the thing is, a lot of other critters, especially birds, depend on them for food... and they're already gone, so that means the black fly eaters are scrambling for something else to eat. Mother Nature doesn't have Grub Hub. And that's just one species - I've noticed a lot of plants and animals struggling after our abnormally hot and cold winter and a spring of fluctuating drought and flood, combined with temps in the 80's followed shortly by the first May killing frost in my admittedly limited memory.
Does that mean I think we should just give up? No, absolutely not. Even if we can't bring the earth back to where it was before the human arsonists took over, we can maybe, hopefully, stall the change out long enough for the earth to adapt. But I believe that, no matter what, we will lose a lot - a lot of plants and other critters will have to pay for our sins. At the very least, we will probably be forced into giving up the relatively cushy lifestyle to which most of us have become accustomed...
With or without us, the earth will survive. I think that the only way we'll get to be around another 300,000 years is if we learn to live within our means - if we insist on eating or burning up everything in sight, the earth will probably end up going on without us.
My sense is it wilI take a lot of cooperation to change the trend. I am hopeful but the purpose of the story today was to stress how front loaded (recent) our activities have been. I think the habits of humanity up until about 200 years ago were genuinely of no consequence relative to the ecosystem. Current patterns are quite different and that, perhaps, is why there is a loud minority sounding off it cannot be us. Exponential observations are difficult to process.
The black flies are prevalent in Minnesota -- think 17000 lakes :) My next post is about the most unlikely of disruptions to the food chain and the consequences of single failures in the chain like black flies. Grub Hub made me smile.
I agree with you about the species disruption. The tough part is no one knows the consequence. We only have fossil studies that tell us we are driving more extinctions than ever exclusive of catastrophic natural disasters like large scale volcanic activity or an asteroid?
I wrote a post long ago titled "Mass Extinction". My sense is no one read it :(
THANKS SO MUCH for the thoughtful comment Jeannine!
You are very welcome. It's a very interesting (though frightening) topic! I'm glad you're writing again and am looking forward to reading about unlikely disruptions to the food chain...
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on Notes, Mark. One thing I've noticed is that anyone can "Restack" anyone's post or a comment. I think it might be easy to click some of these options without fully meaning to interact with Notes.
Also, your observations about the feed being filled reminded me of something someone once told me about restaurants in tourist areas, that they need to have a certain capacity of people inside in order to attract more customers. If it's too empty, people are wary of coming in. I wonder if filling the feed if Substack's way of making a place feel invitingly busy. Like, "Hey, there's stuff going on here you might want to be part of!"
YES! There is a silly little box at the bottom of every comment now and if you check it, the best analogy is you are SHOUTING AT THE LUNCH TABLE. I have found many of my favorite Substack authors who "aren't sure about Notes" or "don't use it" tend to clutter the feed consistently nevertheless. The other very concerning trend is the rise of people talking about random followers and likers (bots) associated with their Substack. Filling the feed is remarkably important for an algorithm as machine learning and insight cannot emerge without data volume. This is why I doubt it when people write "it is up to us what Notes becomes". My sense is no one was hoping for spam follower bots and lots of comments like "for sure". I returned to Substack posting this morning at least for a while.
I like your analogy about the restaurant. To me the whole weirdness around virality is a symptom. Likes and Restacks follow the road previously traveled. Here is my idea about social media that would tamp down the fire and be more authentic.
(1) Add a SPAMMY button next to the like. This would allow people to express what they would LIKE TO SEE LESS OF. This is not negative, it is informational. Misuse of the button could help individuals AND Substack better guide thoughtful discourse and even ferret out the noisy users and even the bots.
(2) The ratio of likes to spammys could allow us to know who the noisemakers are.
I know better than to present this as an idea in a Substack Forum :(
I saw some of the things about the bots -- cryptocurrency accounts? Doesn't really matter what it's for, it's just such a hassle for people to deal with!
The whole "it is up to us what Notes becomes" always feels very wishful thinking to me. I understand the desire to believe that but it does seem to show a lack of understanding of what is built into these systems and why.
In any case, I'm glad that you took on an experiment for the rest of us!
It is all so silly it seems -- while I haven't done much of it, when it was just a newsletter and someone making nonsensical or abusive remarks you can block them. Once you socialize (randomize) it, maintenance becomes overwhelming and you wake up one day and find your platform has an amazing percentage of bots -- who knew? This is harder now as MUTING anywhere is muting everywhere. Muting an inane comment in Notes cascades to your Newsletter subscriptions which seems unfortunate and excessive. By globalizing the mute setting, Substack reduces agency for the user.
Yes! It's all that uncompensated labor that suddenly becomes part of simply being on the platform.
I haven't tried muting anyone. I went deep into settings and turned off notifications, but Substack's system for those still seems kind of buggy. I still get "so-and-so posted a Note" sometimes, and miss notifications for others things. Guess I'll have to keep checking.
Love this piece. I’m “other” in your survey because I believe in the gray area. Yes, the climate is changing, no it is not a crisis.
Thanks for reading n commenting CK! -- I am an optimist and spent a lot of time in my work around stuff I now question. My first impulse is my thoughts are just a product of getting older 😊 I wrote a post long ago titled The Trifecta. There will always be stuff to worry about
Enjoyed the video very powerful. As you know I write about issues of climate change and for the most part I believe we are really in the soup now on terms of 'fixing' the pending ravages of climate change. But evolution has its cycles and being aware of what needs to happen and what needs to be nurtured and kept is an awareness that Aboriginal people held sacred.
Thanks for commenting De. Glad you enjoyed the music video. He is one of my favorites.
Glad to see you back and writing in the Substack world. Notes haven't affected me I guess as I don't see them unless I go looking for them. And at this point I'm not interested in looking for them. lol
Thanks for checking in! I enjoyed writing this one -- fun to put something together again . It is interesting that most of the post was about something else (~75%) but lots of comments about Notes! It is definitely on people's minds. For me I just decided I would allot a certain amount of time to Substack each week. If I cannot keep to the schedule I will read less. More time for family, activities, and book reading! It will be interesting after four weeks I will rightsize how the time gets spent.
I love thinking that I am basically mostly cauliflower. That really puts things in perspective.
A Brooklyn Brassica floret is you -- Here is my favorite clever title from the past https://markdolan.substack.com/all-hail-crucifer
I love this essay, Mark! Brilliantly written and distilled, I love the clock analogies which are really visual, and the list of THT qualities feel right on! I'm short-term pessimistic but long-term optimistic on climate change: we can't fix it, but we can mitigate and recover with strong enough will and innovation (combined). We need to stop doing what got us here, and start doing other things instead!
Thanks for your kind words Stephanie. When I started crunching the numbers to a time of day, it seemed wrong and even depressing. It is definitely easy to become pessimistic for the scale of the challenges but we've never had better tools. I fear human tendencies are the wildcard. I think the program you introduced me to has changed my perspective a bit and opened my eyes to things I had not considered before.
I think it's too late to reverse climate change - it's happening right now. The black flies came out about three weeks early and are pretty much done at this point - they generally are out by mid May and gone by mid June. Yeah, I know, who cares, they're evil, bloodsucking insects, but the thing is, a lot of other critters, especially birds, depend on them for food... and they're already gone, so that means the black fly eaters are scrambling for something else to eat. Mother Nature doesn't have Grub Hub. And that's just one species - I've noticed a lot of plants and animals struggling after our abnormally hot and cold winter and a spring of fluctuating drought and flood, combined with temps in the 80's followed shortly by the first May killing frost in my admittedly limited memory.
Does that mean I think we should just give up? No, absolutely not. Even if we can't bring the earth back to where it was before the human arsonists took over, we can maybe, hopefully, stall the change out long enough for the earth to adapt. But I believe that, no matter what, we will lose a lot - a lot of plants and other critters will have to pay for our sins. At the very least, we will probably be forced into giving up the relatively cushy lifestyle to which most of us have become accustomed...
With or without us, the earth will survive. I think that the only way we'll get to be around another 300,000 years is if we learn to live within our means - if we insist on eating or burning up everything in sight, the earth will probably end up going on without us.
My sense is it wilI take a lot of cooperation to change the trend. I am hopeful but the purpose of the story today was to stress how front loaded (recent) our activities have been. I think the habits of humanity up until about 200 years ago were genuinely of no consequence relative to the ecosystem. Current patterns are quite different and that, perhaps, is why there is a loud minority sounding off it cannot be us. Exponential observations are difficult to process.
The black flies are prevalent in Minnesota -- think 17000 lakes :) My next post is about the most unlikely of disruptions to the food chain and the consequences of single failures in the chain like black flies. Grub Hub made me smile.
I agree with you about the species disruption. The tough part is no one knows the consequence. We only have fossil studies that tell us we are driving more extinctions than ever exclusive of catastrophic natural disasters like large scale volcanic activity or an asteroid?
I wrote a post long ago titled "Mass Extinction". My sense is no one read it :(
THANKS SO MUCH for the thoughtful comment Jeannine!
You are very welcome. It's a very interesting (though frightening) topic! I'm glad you're writing again and am looking forward to reading about unlikely disruptions to the food chain...
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on Notes, Mark. One thing I've noticed is that anyone can "Restack" anyone's post or a comment. I think it might be easy to click some of these options without fully meaning to interact with Notes.
Also, your observations about the feed being filled reminded me of something someone once told me about restaurants in tourist areas, that they need to have a certain capacity of people inside in order to attract more customers. If it's too empty, people are wary of coming in. I wonder if filling the feed if Substack's way of making a place feel invitingly busy. Like, "Hey, there's stuff going on here you might want to be part of!"
YES! There is a silly little box at the bottom of every comment now and if you check it, the best analogy is you are SHOUTING AT THE LUNCH TABLE. I have found many of my favorite Substack authors who "aren't sure about Notes" or "don't use it" tend to clutter the feed consistently nevertheless. The other very concerning trend is the rise of people talking about random followers and likers (bots) associated with their Substack. Filling the feed is remarkably important for an algorithm as machine learning and insight cannot emerge without data volume. This is why I doubt it when people write "it is up to us what Notes becomes". My sense is no one was hoping for spam follower bots and lots of comments like "for sure". I returned to Substack posting this morning at least for a while.
I like your analogy about the restaurant. To me the whole weirdness around virality is a symptom. Likes and Restacks follow the road previously traveled. Here is my idea about social media that would tamp down the fire and be more authentic.
(1) Add a SPAMMY button next to the like. This would allow people to express what they would LIKE TO SEE LESS OF. This is not negative, it is informational. Misuse of the button could help individuals AND Substack better guide thoughtful discourse and even ferret out the noisy users and even the bots.
(2) The ratio of likes to spammys could allow us to know who the noisemakers are.
I know better than to present this as an idea in a Substack Forum :(
I saw some of the things about the bots -- cryptocurrency accounts? Doesn't really matter what it's for, it's just such a hassle for people to deal with!
The whole "it is up to us what Notes becomes" always feels very wishful thinking to me. I understand the desire to believe that but it does seem to show a lack of understanding of what is built into these systems and why.
In any case, I'm glad that you took on an experiment for the rest of us!
It is all so silly it seems -- while I haven't done much of it, when it was just a newsletter and someone making nonsensical or abusive remarks you can block them. Once you socialize (randomize) it, maintenance becomes overwhelming and you wake up one day and find your platform has an amazing percentage of bots -- who knew? This is harder now as MUTING anywhere is muting everywhere. Muting an inane comment in Notes cascades to your Newsletter subscriptions which seems unfortunate and excessive. By globalizing the mute setting, Substack reduces agency for the user.
Yes! It's all that uncompensated labor that suddenly becomes part of simply being on the platform.
I haven't tried muting anyone. I went deep into settings and turned off notifications, but Substack's system for those still seems kind of buggy. I still get "so-and-so posted a Note" sometimes, and miss notifications for others things. Guess I'll have to keep checking.
Substack has made MUTING a VERY BAD option. It is all-or-nothing. I think if you mute someone on Notes, they cannot like or comment on your Substack.