Fk You to Threads' In-app Browser

Threads presents an invasive, shitty, UX for no justifiable reason, but I guess we're used to this now.

Meta’s Facebook’s Instagram’s Threads’ in-app browser can go straight to hell. It is not just the default setting, you cannot choose to turn it off. It’s the worst possible user experience.

I don’t know how many times we have to dance around pretending that there is some reasonable argument for in-app browsers, but there just isn’t. In-app browsers cut users off from sites they log into on their standard browser, forcing them to log in multiple times on the same device. They cut users off from history and browsing tools they have learned when they choose or accept their default browser.

In-app browsers are incredibly privacy invasive. They let the parent app do all sorts of shitty things to track you and intentionally evade any protections you’ve given yourself through your browser choice and configuration.

Apps are fundamentally bad, but in-app browsers are even worse. A plague on modern app development—a potent avoidance strategy of privacy advances in the browser and device—they present no advantage to the user.

In-app browsers are fundamentally worse experiences designed for only two purposes: more invasive tracking and to keep you trapped inside an app at the moment you have specifically made a choice to escape. They make it harder to read the web while parasitically benefitting from the open web’s existence.

Get me out of the app!

In-app browsers make it harder to share pages to other apps, a down-right crime in our new era of social platform plurality. Worst of all, they prevent you from using the browser experience you’ve specifically selected on your phone.

In-app browsers are gross. Their very existence shows that the 30% that app stores claim as a tax used for moderation and safety for users is a dirty lie. That the dominant phone OSes allow them to exist is a fundamental compromise of any claim that they are acting on behalf of users.

In-app browsers are fundamentally anti-user. And yet… they fking persist.

Notably none of new batch of social networks require in-app browsers. Except Threads.

Oh, plenty of apps keep trying to sneak it back in, to change the defaults on an update, to convince you: this time the in-app browser is good. But it is not good. Users have, historically, rejected it in the micro-blogging context in particular. By which I mean Twitter. Chances are if you’ve come here from Twitter you’ve turned off your in-app browser in that app at least two times.

Text-focused social networks like the growing selection of Twitter competitors, and Twitter itself, understand that their primary use is link amplification and organization. Threads—Meta’s new offering to the ‘what if Twitter wasn’t run by an egomaniac racist discriminatory asshole’ product category—is a short-post text-focused social network. Therefore its primary use is also link amplification and organization. At least 50% of what you do on Threads is click links.

Instagram has long managed to get away with its in-app browser because it is designed as a link-light social network. You are not joining Instagram to share links. That doesn’t make Instagram’s in-app browser more acceptable, it just makes it less noticeable and annoying.

Threads is a link-heavy social network. Threads is a network for sharing links. That’s what all short-post text-focused social networks are for. If anyone tells you that there is a social network whose primary medium is short text and it isn’t for sharing links… they are a liar. For all the attempts that social networks make to keep you inside the walled garden, it just isn’t possible for a format like Threads and Twitter presents.

That’s why Threads’ in-app browser isn’t just a bad user experience, it isn’t just privacy-invasive… it is offensive. The Threads in-app browser isn’t just bad, it actively counteracts the entire user flow of that type of social network Threads intends to create.

Facebook is loathe to give up the in-app browser because it gives them so many better options for tracking and because it is their best tool for preventing users from realizing that a great deal of their “Facebook” interactions aren’t on a platform owned by Meta. But while it is bad everywhere, it is unacceptable on Threads.

Threads doesn’t just present an in-app browser… it doesn’t allow you to choose anything else. Unlike almost every other non-Meta social network app, there is no way to turn off the opening of external links in the in-app browser and there is no justification for it. I don’t mean this metaphorically. Meta/Facebook/Instagram has never given any real justification for its use of in-app browsers in any of its apps and absolutely hasn’t for Threads.

In-app browsers are unacceptable in any context but on Threads, where the primary action is clicking on links, it is anti-user. It is impossible to sustain. No one should accept this. Yell, thread, tweet, email, weave, whatever it takes. You cannot let this stand. If you let Threads get away with it, then the window of what is acceptable changes and more will try. Apps are already barely useable but a world of apps where we allow Twitter clones to get away with in-app browsers as a default unalterable setting is fking unlivable.

Don’t settle for any social network that telegraphs just how much it hates you by forcing you into in-app browsers.

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Music Break

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I promise I’ll get to my Reddit API post next time around. This just was too infuriating. I’ve decided to try an open comment section for this post. Don’t disappoint me by being an asshole.

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This post represents my **personal** opinion and does not reflect the position of my current, past, or future employers, this platform, or anyone other than me singularly.

Programming Note: A Name Change

Rebuilding for purpose

Hello! You may not recognize the name of this newsletter. It was once “It Started With A Tweet” but I’m getting increasingly sick of Twitter (in case that wasn’t clear in the previous newsletter) and the idea of tying any part of my online identity to it feels bad. So I felt a rename of the newsletter is in order.

This newsletter is now Schizochronotopia, which I’m sure is just as hard to remember how to type as the last long name I gave my newsletter, but at least it has a nice domain attached to it. I’ve tried to shift some of the colors around as well. I think I’ve kept it accessible visually, but if it isn’t, let me know.

With my output on Twitter likely to go down, the type of stuff I like to talk about there is going to end up more and more on there. So I picked a name that, in more ways than one, reflects this new focus.

The first is the connection to my Twitter username, I think that is fitting. The second way the name reflects what I want to do more of here is a little more complicated.

You may not realize this but once upon a time I was an English major in college and a pretty big fan of all types of literary analysis. I was then, and still am, very interested in media literacy, deep reading, and contrasting the results of different types of analysis. My Twitter username “Chronotope” came about during this time. I was working heavily in the digital humanities space and thought that it would be a fun reference that a few people would get and the rest would just think it sounded sort of cool. You know… internet username thinking.

“two chronotopes” as rendered by Midjourney

It has been a long time since writing deep literary analysis was a regular occurrence for me, so hopefully in trying to explain this I won’t sound like too much of an idiot or get it incredibly wrong. Chronotope is a concept from Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin who originally used it as part of an analysis of literature which centered around the idea that time and space metaphorically fuse to create concepts that are similar to genre. These are chronotopes which can be used to define a story even if the timespace is outside of the borders of the exact story being told. To steal and summarize the Wikipedia article on this, the timespace of “the road” is something that mediates stories, connects them, and allows them to be interpreted in relation to each other and in relation to the concept. Chronotopes are fusions of specific spaces and times from which narratives originate.

This was particularly appealing to me when I wrote my first Tweet because my focus at the time was thinking about stories and specifically how to read and tell them using technology.

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From there I ended up on an unexpected path, the goal was to figure out ways to tell stories using technology, and I ended up a copy editor, a journalist and then a web engineer because I kept chasing this concept: what can we do to enable better storytelling with technology? I suspect I’m not the only one.

Eventually, I found out that the biggest problem that we needed to overcome was advertising, or more specifically: how to make money writing on the internet. That’s how I ended up working on ad tech and discovering that it was and continues to be a huge disaster. I kept chasing the biggest problem for telling stories on the internet and it turned out the biggest problem was that no one could make money doing it.

Monetization of written content (and perhaps all types of content) is fundamentally broken. And that problem causes all these other problems: fraud, misinformation, terrible media businesses, bad coverage decisions, bad US presidents, bad laws, bad companies, and quite a stack of additional problems that I suspect we’ll dig into in future newsletters.

Schizochronotopia is also a term from literary analysis (surprising from me, right?!) which refers to when stories, people and landscapes are trapped between timespaces. To paraphrase Wikipedia again: a rift where the past and present render each other unbidden, that is a schizochronotopia. We are trapped between time, space, theme, past, present and future. Right now talking about media, ad tech, and the economics of a present built by Silicon Valley feels very much like trying to render some very different concepts into something that hopefully makes sense.

Thus the name. My goal is to continue to try and describe mediatech though a filter of the specific chronotopes relevant to the discussion. I think that it is impossible to move forward without understanding that our present is very much grounded in our past. We’ll need to talk about history to understand that nothing in the present is particularly new. Maybe we’ll find some solutions along the way.

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This is not a sponsored link or anything, I just want to note for an example of what I’m talking about, a solid chronotope for understanding the central themes of tech past/present, I recommend you read along with me Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, by Malcolm Harris.

It’s exactly what I’m talking about: a history of a place that has metastasized into a sort of symbolic concept that is very much associated with everything happening right now. You should read it!

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Ok, that’s enough literary theory for now. Back to our regularly scheduled programming from here on out. Next newsletter will probably be about Reddit being run by a big dummy.

On Twitter, we look down

Why am I still on Twitter? An in-depth investigation.

Look, I don’t really have much interest or respect for an asshole who intentionally goes around calling themselves ‘catturd’ but when that character is one who you’ve bent the rules to allow them to spout bullshit on your platform and even they are mad at you, it’s clear that you’re not on a path to make reasonable friends.

I don’t think it is an exceptional assumption to look at the activity of the world’s most online billionaire and see him going down a well-known radicalization pipeline, exploring more extreme beliefs, dropping more (and I must emphasize: only relatively more) sensible friends and finding comfort in the welcoming arms of extremism. Musk is following a not-particularly-exceptional path that many a white man has taken before and you can take his antisemitic conspiracy theory bullshit about Soros as just a deeper step in that pattern. I think we can argue about if Musk has gone Nazi, but he is indisputably going Nazi in an extremely predictable way. There is no arguing with the fact that not only is Musk Going Nazi directly in front of us but he is intentionally leveraging, using, and getting benefit from Twitter to do it.

Twitter used to be the place to speak truth to power, now it's a platform for power to speak over you as obnoxiously as possible.

As such, existing on Twitter has entered a very particularly tenuous state. You get the distinct feeling that we are living in the first, new, verse of an old poem.

First they came for the transgender people and I did not say anything, because I was not transgender.

It’s clear that the Right’s “war on woke” is coming from them being Too Online. But that’s not exactly right. More than one study has shown that while, Twitter has never been a majority traffic source, stories and trends start on Twitter and transition to other platforms where the actually trackable “virality” happens. We can see that the Right’s trend towards more extreme and better organized hate, bigotry and transphobia (hint: I’m using the rule of threes here, these are all the same) is unmistakably gaining energy from the end of real moderation on Twitter. Even if it wasn’t, hate is determinedly persisting and spreading, with the significant help of Twitter’s owner and his shitty little account.

I shouldn’t have to explain why this particular bigotry is just one step towards fascism. By now you should know how this works. You should look at the rhetoric attempting to de-person trans people and find it unacceptable even if it stopped at that. But you should also know it won’t stop at that. This isn’t a stretch. It’s already happening. Silicon Valley is full of little “mouthbreathing machiavellis” and their tendency towards fascism is becoming more pronounced and less easy to ignore. Nowhere is this more obvious than with Elon Musk and his increasingly fash-friendly shitstorm of a platform.

So it is indeed worth asking… why the fuck are we still on there?

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When Facebook was starting to go bad, it was more like watching a old family friend of your friend’s parents’ get alzheimer's. Sure, Facebook couldn’t remember who you were but also you couldn’t really remember why to care. I don’t know how else to describe it. I should have felt worse about suddenly departing Facebook. For years I’d built not just an audience but a significant amount of traffic routed through Facebook to my own efforts. Enough that I could run somewhat notable experiments. At peak, I likely could marshal more traffic than the average local newspaper. It felt like, in some ways, Facebook was more a part of my identity than Twitter ever has been. While I’ve had more than one person say they ‘oh, I follow you on Twitter’, for years multiple people would introduce me as “the guy who posts really good stuff on Facebook.” I’m not bragging. I’m pretty sure that isn’t something to be proud of. But it was a thing I cared about and put a lot of effort into for a pretty long time. Despite all the relative success I found DJing news articles on Facebook I dropped it dead basically overnight.

While I (once) made it far more viral on Twitter than I ever did on Facebook this was never rewarded by the platform with significant success or a continuous flow of interaction or traffic in the same way Facebook did. The success of content on Twitter happens off the platform and the success of people on Twitter happens off the platform. The way Twitter works is: it does not reward its adherents until someone else does. Twitter has never verified me. It hasn’t rewarded me with a million followers. It hasn’t gotten me a book deal. Twitter, the platform itself, does nothing for its users. What the hell do we get out of it exactly?

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The mistake every analyst makes about Twitter is the assumption that it is a self-contained platform. That Twitter is about itself. That is incorrect.

Twitter is not a social network. Twitter is an event platform where we celebrate content. Its other function is to help you desperately try not to be the subject of content. Twitter is a platform where we have a big party every time someone posts online some writing we like or a big roast when they post some real bad shit (and yes, specifically writing).

Twitter has never been a microphone, it has always been an amp.

The truth of Twitter is that it supplies power through the connections of communities in a way that nothing has before and nothing has since. A particular irony is capitalists are obsessed with Twitter when it is really an evolution of the People’s Microphone concept we saw so well deployed during Occupy.

Twitter hasn’t just been useful for getting refunds from bad behaving corporations. It hasn’t just been responsible for (at least) my last two jobs. It hasn’t just been a venue to connect with experts and learn things that I didn’t even know were available to learn.

It has shamed powerful men and amplified the work of those who would see them dispossessed of power.

It has made an entire sector of shitty humans so afraid of “canceling” that they literally cannot stop talking about it, that they have turned “talking about canceling” into an industry.

Twitter has changed the world in a way that none of the other tech companies really have. Facebook hasn’t done more than take up our attention, fart out bad UI in the night, and, lately, fall down a hill. Google may have organized the world’s information and made itself richer than … most countries, I guess? But what did it do in your life? Do you remember something happening on Facebook like you remember the Arab Spring happening on Twitter? Do you remember Google as part of your life during crazy shit like Jan 6th? If you’re reading this: you used Twitter and it’s a part of your memory like the others just aren’t.

What Twitter does is connect us, often to people we would never connect to without its help. In doing so, when it is good, it opens our mind to things that would never have found us otherwise.

Now, all of this is good, and it is also very bad. These same tools could and were freely used by shitty people to do terrible things. But it isn’t only that.

Some people who complained about Twitter really just don’t like the rest of us talking back. Now they’re the ones in charge. They have turned the arc of power on Twitter against most of its users. They have turned Twitter from the People’s Microphone to the Oligarch’s Podium. We already have plenty of those. So what is the reason I’m still on Twitter? Why is anyone with a sense of morality and a modicum of thought on Twitter?

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The answer comes easier than I’d like. Despite the fact that one’s participation on Twitter is implicitly supporting a project focused on shifting The Discourse to the extreme Right, it is still—for some godawful reason—where my community is. We’re all stuck on Twitter because we’re all fucking grasping each other hoping that we can hold on together and float to the top instead of drown. After all, we have all together floated above similar-seeming maelstroms before. In the past we have achieved change on Twitter not with Twitter but in spite of it.

Collectively we all can’t get around that history of success through togetherness that was once the defining characteristic of Twitter. We are sure that this time will be like all the others; that we will manage to hang together, maintain our community; and make it out of the water before we drown.

No one is floating out of the maelstrom on Twitter this time. We’re going to drown… eventually. That time is far enough off that we can convince ourselves we can somehow rise above the sewer and make it through clean. So you’re on Twitter and so I’m on Twitter and so our community is on Twitter and so you’re on Twitter and so I’m on Twitter. Round and round we go, convinced that this valuable tool that has made a profound impact on our lives isn’t broken irreparably. We pretend our presence isn’t being used to legitimize people who want us all dead, once they finish off the most vulnerable and have the time to get to the rest of us.

We are on Twitter because it’s easy to live our lives and feel safe in the arms of our little communities on the platform, just as long as we don’t look up and see whose flag is flying above us.

Looking up would mean seeing this is all incredibly unacceptable. But I don’t know what else to do or where else we can all gather in the specific way that Twitter has enabled. My community is on Twitter and I can’t leave it. My community won’t leave Twitter unless I start the process by extracting myself.

I’m on Twitter

because I look down.

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I will be changing the name of this newsletter. I think to “Schizochronotopia” (see). If you think that’s a bad idea or you have a better idea of what I should rename it to, reach out ASAP.

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This post represents my **personal** opinion and does not reflect the position of my current, past, or future employers, this platform, or anyone other than me singularly.