@davidrevoy

I'm reading it right now, it's super interesting.

I noticed a small typo: algorythm instead of algorithm.

@dreeg Thanks! fixed.
(and I think I'll have more typo and weird grammar issue : it was a big work to write this post for my English skill)

@lienrag Rien de prévue de mon côté, le blog et mes rezosossio étant en Anglais, mais ça arrive parfois pour certains de mes articles de recevoir une traduction sur le Framablog (et c'est chouette, mes articles sont en CC-By, et le markdown dispo en pied de page pour faciliter le boulot).

@davidrevoy
yeah, my mind stumbled over a few weird bits, but its all right. everything was still easy to grasp.

if you want someone to go over it and fix some more feel free to ask :)
@dreeg

@glowl

Thanks! The quicker way to fix is probably to save the markdown of the article somewhere (in the footer of the article or here davidrevoy.com/data/articles/0 ) modify, and return it to me (or sending a patch, git diff, etc via pasteall.org/ or similar tool ). Simplier than pointing each sentence over comment system. Thank you for your help with this extra polishing pass, but this is not super important todo (petting the cat or the dog should be a higher priority 😺 ).

@dreeg

@davidrevoy Very well written, nice job! Well done for being willing to adapt and for the transparency involved with recent changes 👍

@davidrevoy A few more typos (hope you don't mind):

"Social medias" → "social media"
"thanks your" → "thank your"
"powerfull" → "powerful"
"experimentation(s)" → "experiment(s)"

@theremin Thank you very much for them. I'll fix them later in the evening, I'm away for the evening and my admin panel for the blog on the smartphone is not super easy to fix them on the fly.

@davidrevoy That thing you say about proprietary social media having rules they don't tell us about that changes how our content is engaged with is so true, and so gross. I wonder how many people on Instagram know that your posts will get pushed more if you reply to comments within an hour? Not many I'll bet.

@welshpixie Wow, I had no idea about 'timers' also part of the algorithm for the quickness to reply to comments....

I often read also about frequency of upload.

I'm so glad none of that is here on :fediverse:

(Trying to guess the rules feels like doing an occult reverse engineering. 😆 I'll try to not focus too much energy on it, it sounds like trying to please a capricious invisible evil deity.)

@welshpixie @davidrevoy That makes it not social network at all. It just becomes an extension of the corporate advertising world.

I'm glad they killed my accounts. I would be losing my mind, trying to move how they please!

@davidrevoy I'm interested in seeing how Smartphone optimised episodes will work out in a printed book.

As I recently bought book 1-3 for my daughter (she loves them and the 5-7 pages are perfect for her) I look forward to the shorter episodes.

Nonetheless I'll also miss the longer ones as it's a blast to read such long stories!

@aliceice Thanks, oh, for the Smartphone optimised, it might just look like the book 1. Episodes like peppercarrot.com/xx/webcomic/e and peppercarrot.com/xx/webcomic/e were really thought this way. (I then with years shrinked down the font a bit, and started to make complex page layout for the books). I'll join a graph part of my brainstorming (very visual brainstorming, so it reads super fast).

@davidrevoy Thank you for the graphs and a quick explanation! The first book is wonderful to get my daughter into 'Peppa-Carro' 😁

I myself like the long ones better, but I'm also trying to get myself to read longer books again after years of 10 minutes here, 5 there readings.

@davidrevoy Very sorry to hear about these problems and that you are not free in choosing your format of publishing due to seemingly arbitrary rules.

There is actually a term for that called "structural violence" and I believe content creators on social media do very much suffer from it.

@le_ArthurDent Thank you. This is very interesting to point the "structural violence". About the format adaptation; it's not that much the part violent: constrains of format always triggered more creativity (eg. limitation of video games in the 90s, print centuries ago, etc), but the "hidden rules" of algorithm is very violent.
It feels like of one of this cruel challenge as on "Squid Game", with the bridge made of glass and challenger not knowing what tile is fragile or solid to cross it.

@davidrevoy good reminder to setup a donation ;) Thanks for your work!

@davidrevoy Once upon a time I managed a FB page with, I believe, 2K-3K or so followers. Everything went fine until FB decided to change their software (I believe around 2015) to sweep the content posted by FB pages from the users' timelines (unless you paid them, that is). I ended up posting to 2 or 3 people reactions. Then I came to the conclusion that everything was rotten, and decided I wouldn't give any more of my time to FB. So I nuked that useless thing.

@tagomago Oh, I totally understand. I was also more than once tempted to do the same. I'll keep it as long as it doesn't cost me more than a copy/paste. But to open this page, I have all my protection 'on': special tab container, Adv blocker, fake browser agent... 🤣

@davidrevoy Yes, you have to put on your diving suit to descend into the ad abyss. 🤿

@davidrevoy I'm sorry you're facing this.

I loved your longform format, but I understand!

Wow, proprietary social networks are a powerful tool for Hollywood to manufacture peer-pressure for the DRM'd spectacles...

@alcinnz Thank you (I'll still try to maintain story arc in background of the short episode, a bit as I did for the potion contest arc on episode 3, 4 and 6).

@davidrevoy Thanks for that analysis and sorry to hear that you have to make those changes.

All the best and thank you for making pepper & carrot!

@davidrevoy this is so frustrating. I wish you had more freedom than the modern Internet allows. :(

(Et salut depuis le Mexique en passant! 👋)

@davidrevoy Thanks a lot for sharing your insights!
Good to hear, that you found a strategy to deal with these culture damaging regulations! I hope so much it's going to work out for you! Even though I deeply commiserate, that these companies lower your freedom as an artist, by forcing you to adapt to their arbitrary rules, to me, your strategy sound like an artist's style of hacking social media! This is, where I start to like the story.

@davidrevoy
And thank you so much for publishing the article in English!

@ds Oh thanks for pointing the 'social hacking' part of this process of guessing algorithm.

I'm reading ("long term digesting chapter by chapter" would be more accurate) a book about it recently. It's a large, dense, and thick one in French from @Hackingsocial , hacking-social.com/2021/09/17/ , so maybe the changes I do are in relation with what I'm starting to put in motion about it.

(note: I quote them here just to pass a 'thank you' to them :blobcatheart: .)

@s8n Thank you for your comment; it reminds me to think about what I should set to be hard limit and boundaries of what I'm ready to change to follow the evolution and what shouldn't. I'll try to protect as much as I can.

@davidrevoy @s8n i myself dont use twitter, anyway do you try to encourage people to try out mastodon? :3. anyway da comics are nice and da cat is cute c:

@davidrevoy Admittedly, I tend to put off long content for later and possibly never really look at it anyway. I'm not sure what others do, but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't any algorithm doing it's job, just people, especially with how catchy that small comic is. :>

@Artha Yes, that's also one of the simpliest explanation and often the right one. 👍 I wish I could do the reverse experiment: post episode 36 directly on Twitter, and for the comic strip Imagination post only a thumbnail and a external link.

@yrdael For sure, not a dramatic change of shape; it's a return to format of ep 7 or 8 (shorter episode, many wide panels, fewer speechbubble text, simple layout) , and also I'll totally abandon cliffhanger as at the end of episode 34 with Pepper escaping on broom from Shichimi's ceremony issue.
So, it feels more like a "back to origin'+ post directly on social media change. I could probably have done the change without telling about it, but I prefer to eplain audience where I'm going. 🙂

@davidrevoy also, you can use various ways to present your episodes on the ongoing work you're doing.
It can shake things up from time to time. You're probably already doing it I don't know. I'm late on reading your work. I enjoy waiting for a few episodes before reading, just so I have a bunch to discover.

@davidrevoy C'est tellement injuste que le dernier épisode ait eu si peu d'audience, vu que c'est le plus long, le plus qualitatif et le plus audacieux qui ait été fait jusqu'ici.

@davidrevoy
J'ai fini de lire ton article. Très intéressant. C'est dommage que ça soit difficile voire impossible de se faire connaître sans les réseaux sociaux non libres. Depuis que j'ai tourné le dos au gros F, son compère l'appareil-photo et l'oiseau bleu, j'ai l'impression de parler dans le vide. Je comprends que tu continues à rester dessus par nécessité. Espérons qu'un jour, tu n'en auras plus besoin.

@davidrevoy La question étant, comment intéresser les personnes sur ces platerforme à venir te suivre ici sur masto... et ainsi regagner de l'indépendance vis à vis de ces algos néfastes ? Y'aurait-il une voie à envisager avec des posts plus "riches" qui pourraient donner envie de te suivre plutôt ici ?

@imacrea Qui dit faire des posts plus riche ici, dit faire des posts plus pauvres là-bas. Ce qui est encore plus se tirer une balle dans le pied et pas chouette le message pour mon audience bien aimé sur Fb, Insta et Tw... On ne s'inscrit pas à un reseau spécifique pour un artiste de sa timeline seulement, on préfère arrêter de le suivre si ça devient problématique.
Mais on est d'accord: la :fediverse: est une solution. Continuer d'informer est le mieux, après, les choix sont individuels. 😉💚

@davidrevoy
Yeah, I've gotten increasingly frustrated with FB's post promotion/demotion antics, myself.

I did find that images and text posts on the site get better exposure than links.

But a lot more people respond to posts I put up here on Mastodon. It's a lot more fun.

@davidrevoy, please consider offsetting your panel gutters like this, it makes it easier to understand the reading order
@davidrevoy Oh, those were Twitter's picture interface, I didn't realize that, I've never used Twitter. In that case, this is a better example from the actual comic:
@Sandra @davidrevoy First I'm hearing about this kind of layout. Is there a name for it? How does it compare to adding row spacing or numbering panels? Sounds like it could be good for cognitive a11y.

Image/figure sequence could be a good thing to bring up if I make it to a WAI meeting; they're working on the foundations of WCAG 3.0, which will give more attention to coga.
@Seirdy @davidrevoy It's a good complement to gutter width (i.e. what youncalled "row spacing") and panel numbers. (I've seen East Asian comics that relied only on this to the extent that they have gutter width break precedence, i.e. they had greater vertical gutter space even when the reading order was horizontal, which was made clear by the gutter offset.)

I've always called this gutter offset "the block rule" until Rachel Thorn a few years ago started calling it "the T-rule". Basically: never do a four-way intersection, always offset in reading precedence order.

Note that it's a precedence signifier (which also is true for gutter distance); there also additionally needs to be a start signifier and a general direction signifier.

It's cognitive a11y, but it's also cross-cultural a11y.
@Seirdy In @davidrevoy's example, the post's avatar and text title is a good start signifier and the signature a good ending signifier.
@Seirdy You could try to get ahold of Neil from https://www.visuallanguagelab.com/ if you're gonna attend WAI on this stuff. ♥

@Sandra @Seirdy Hey, I totally understand and never did the 'four-way intersection' on the comic pages of the episodes themselves as it can really confuse the reading of panel (the proofreading team would directly prevent me to do that)

But, in the format of a square single comic strip, the 4 square sub-panel layout equally split in H and V is pretty standard and widely adopted (meme/may comics/etc). It's like a genre in itself. I'm not sure it is a good idea on it, but I'll study it.

@davidrevoy @Seirdy Yeah, it is standardized and widely adopted (I called it a yonkoma in the media description of my first post in this thread) but the reading order varies across cultures (I've seen NE, SE, NW, SW reading order often, i.e. vertical) so the offset helps cut down those nanoseconds of hesiation / tension for people like me, who aren't the sharpest tools in the proverbial shed.

@Sandra

Oh, that sound like a perfect read. Thank you for the link, I'll buy it immediately, I had no idea something like that existed. 👍

@Seirdy

@davidrevoy I read this a week ago, but only now did it dawn on me that this ties into what Fowl Language is doing when posting on silos.

There will be a post of one frame, and the text "link to full comic in the comments". Now I finally connected that with your observation that posts with links are punished.

I wonder how long that hack will work.

@clacke @davidrevoy I really hope things settle down a bit with the algorithms on the Big Socials. It is great that creative types use their creativity to work around these hostile practices but this is fostering the "cargo cult" mentality already endemic on YouTube so I really hope you can keep a good presence on the indie-web where such things aren't an issue.

Left unchecked, advertising-driven social media algorithms turn all web comics into Garfield.

@msh @clacke Oh yes, I noticed about the links posted in the first comment, or with creator directly commenting their own post after posting.
Some engineers of social media probably laught a lot when they see the rules abandoned by their algorythm while userbase keep the behavior. I wonder how many behavior are efective, and how many are pure superstition. I feel a bit like lab 🐀
😆

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