Mental Barrier and Culture of Gemini

I've saw may posts on Cosmos replying to the "Mayan and Gemini priests" post in the past week. And I want to add a points to the discussion. Hopefully not disrupting the flow of the conversation. I mostly want to add points from a (non-tech) user and user support perspective.

Also, to avoid further claims of this is us Gemini user's bubble. My capsule has a HTML renderer (that I wrote my self, I'm proud of that). So this post is also accessible from the common Web. There's a link on the home page that will take you there. With that out of the way..

One thing I observed in the past year, working at a startup. Whenever users says "it's difficult" or just shy away from using something. Sometimes it not just because it's hard or they don't have the knowledge. Often it's means it is different, thus there's a metal blockage to overcome. Gemini is not like the World Wide Web. Nor Mastodon for that matter. Like, discussion on Gemini are generally long form, thought out and is assisted by super aggregators like Cosmos. It's more akin to publishing scientific papers and getting responses from your peers. A very slow process. Likewise, Gemini does not have a friend system nor a like button. There's no way to know if someone has read or liked your post. You can see replies on Cosmos. But long form replies are hard. And so very few posts actually get replies. At best people saves your post into bookmarks, but you the author never sees that. It's a very different experience.

One may say, that's exactly the point of Gemini - going back to Web 1.0. I agree, I like that and it does what is advertised. On Gemini we don't have ads and everything feels much more organic/authentic. Yet, that's not what common Web users are used to. That's not the social media experience. More aggressively I'd argue that reduced attention span of the general public doesn't help either. Most people just click Back when they don't find anything interesting at the first glance. Let alone reading discussions.

Standing from a normal user's (for lack of a better word) perspective. I think it's understandable to view Gemini having a very high barrier. Not only everyone is writing multi-paragraph posts like it's nothing. Also you don't know if anyone had read your hours of work. With that perspective. It's even more understandable that them thinks us Gemini users are some saint or elitist. Further pushing the barrier even higher.

Again, I'm not saying we should stop. I love going through Cosmos and see what everyone is up to lately. Their thoughts on subjects in life. All without the noise of the common Web. However I do think we need be aware of this division. The common Web has a very different user base and culture. So it's not just a "here's some tutorial and free hosting" thing. We are being viewed as a whole.

Gemini is designed to encourage long and dense textual content. It is what it is. It's the polar opposite of the modern Web. A different culture. And that naturly attracts more certain types of users. That's all. It's pointless to force people stay if they don't enjoy late night deep thinking and reading other's diaries.

I.. made a lot of assumptions here. It's 1:30 AM and I need to sleep.

Author's profile. Photo taken in VRChat by my friend Tast+
Martin Chang
Systems software, HPC, GPGPU and AI. I mostly write stupid C++ code. Sometimes does AI research. Chronic VRChat addict

I run TLGS, a major search engine on Gemini. Used by Buran by default.


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