I’ve arrived late to the party on App.net, which used to be the Twitter alternative for people with $50 to spare. Now, it’s the Twitter alternative for people with $36 to spare. My initial unwillingness to join App.net came from the fifty dollars it cost to join the service in its earliest days. While some recent decisions on behalf of Twitter’s management had—and have—me grumbling, App.net’s price tag kept me from making the jump. Now I have a new job that ostensibly involves social media. With those things in mind, I figured it would be worthwhile to give it a try. I whipped out the debit card, registered my username [1], and started following a bunch of people—mostly those I follow on Twitter, and installed a couple of client apps.

I’ll get to the application experience later, but in the week I’ve been on App.net, it’s left me wondering just what the heck I expected to get out of it. The good news about App.net is that it’s still small enough that I can get some serendipitous connections just by posting. A post asking for advice on Mac clients got a reply from someone who, I presume, saw it on the global feed. Another post about help with TextExpander eventually got the attention of the famous @shawnblanc. The days when you could have something like that happen on Twitter were over about the time I signed up, if not months before. Also, it is nice to use, and the conversation is much more focused than Twitter—the latter being, again I suspect, more a function of the small user base. I also do like the 256 character post limit, but I’m surprisingly terse on these services anyway.

App.net’s third-party apps are of varying quality, most of them in a rough beta stage. The best desktop client I’ve found, thanks to user @aaandy, is Wedge. While a little clunky, and clearly feature-incomplete, what it does do, it does well, and is nice to look at. On my iPhone, I’ve been using Tapbots Netbot. Netbot is a joy to use, and it should be. It’s just their amazing Twitter client, Tweetbot, slightly modified to use App.net, and works the same, right down to the UI. [2] I’ve not wanted for a good Twitter client experience, but the way Twitter’s treating third-party clients makes me think I will be wanting in the future. App.net has me covered.

The problem with App.net for me, is that there’s very little there. Admittedly, I’m following 18 users, compared to the 113 I follow on Twitter. I also have four users following me,[3] limiting the amount of expected interaction on any posts. Almost everyone I follow on App.net, I also follow on Twitter, and all but one of them uses Twitter far more than App.net. This means that if I want to know what, say, Jim Dalrymple thinks about the new iPad mini, I have to go to Twitter, and not App.net. And that’s just for the people on both services! When it comes to actually having stuff to see and read, Twitter is where the action is, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. App.net is where the geeks play, and while I am a proud geek, most of the people I care about and follow are not.

Which throws another social media service into the mix: Facebook, which I have discussed before, more than once. Facebook is where my real friends are—the ones who I see in the flesh on a regular basis, share drinks, handshakes, and hugs with. If I want to know what they’re up to, and I do, I either have to go to Facebook, or live in the dark. For me, Facebook is where the action is, followed by Twitter. However, I can say that App.net is more lively than Google+.

Twitter and Facebook, offer me two different, but slightly overlapping audiences. What I post on either service is targeted to the people on the service I post it on. Sometimes, I post the same thing to both. Who is my audience on App.net? Because of its size, its simultaneously everyone and no one. This leaves me with little to use it for, and what I do use it for, will often be cross-posted to Twitter. I’d like to find a niche for all of these, App.net especially, as it is an investment of $36 per year, and the $4.99 I spent on NetBot. I don’t want this to be a waste of time and money. For now, however, my attention is going to have to go where the action is.

Boris cuts my hair.

Boris is a Russian immigrant, and looks the part. A hulking rock of a man, with black hair, and a thick black mustache whose corners come down to the edge of his lips. The mustache, up close, has a few silver hairs in it, as does the hair visible beyond the edges of his kippah. He wears a barbers smock, white with blue line drawings of scissors, razors, mirrors, jars of Barbicide. His accent is thick. English is not his first language. And yet, he is friendly, polite, well spoken, if terse.

And he wields the fastest pair of scissors in the Borough of Queens. Possibly, in the entire city. Fast enough, I’d say, that he could hold down a second job as a Cuisinart.

One of the first things on my list once I arrived in my new home was to find a good barber shop. Back in Philadelphia, as my move grew closer, I put off getting a haircut. I’d twice tried to go to my old barbers in Center City, but found they were closed. Once, it was my fault for forgetting they were closed on Sundays. The other time, I don’t know why they were closed. I was depressed, my hair was long and shaggy, and I decided it would be an added incentive to find a barber shop once I moved.

During my college years, I had long hair. I grew a wild mane that, at one point, fell down to the top of my backside. When it was time to remove it, I went to a proper hair salon, spending fifty dollars to have a professional cut and style it. Money well spent. While I was comfortably well off, I kept going back to her, but this grew unsustainable. I went to the local beauty school, paying students to cut my hair, unsure of what I was getting. I gave them up when I found my barber shop. For sixteen bucks, they cut my hair, trimmed my sideburns and eyebrows, and did it quickly.

There’s a risk in trying any new place to get a haircut. Before settling on my barber in Philly, I poured over Yelp reviews. I didn’t want to go just anywhere, and take my chance. I only get a haircut every six weeks or so… more like “or so” for me. I didn’t want to travel out of my way, or pay out the nose if I didn’t have to. I had made my home, but it was doomed to be temporary, knowing I would be moving after only a handful of cuts.

I found Boris by near serendipity. Yes, I used Yelp, but I didn’t discover his shop immediately. Not far, down on Jamaica Avenue, there’s another barber shop, one famous for its cuts. I was all set to make the hike down there, only to find out that they focused on a different clientele, and didn’t provide the sort of haircut I was looking for. Dejected, I returned to the Internet.

There was one review of Boris’s shop, but it was glowing. Five stars. Excited. One bright, warm, Thursday morning in late Summer, I made the hike. It’s a mile from my building to Union Turnpike and 162nd Street. The shop is unassuming. No name, just a pale red awning with the words “Barber Shop”, and a rotating red, white, and blue barber’s pole by the door. I thought it may have been closed, but looking in, I saw Boris. I entered, was seated in a red leather barber chair, enrobed in a black barber’s cloth.

I told him to take an inch off the top. Clippers on the back and sides. Trim my sideburns, but keep them the same length. Out came the clippers, at a 3. I felt my hair slip away, the weight holding it down going with it. We spoke, politely. I told him I was new to the neighborhood, came from Philadelphia. He told me about his trip to see the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall.

Then, out came the scissors.

A few tentative test snips in the air, first, like a batter taking a practice swing before the pitch. I felt him take up some hair, and then felt a swish of air, followed by a quiet click. Again. Again. Hair flew away from me like leaves on the wind. He adjusted my head, kept snipping away, and before I knew what had happened, he handed me my glasses, and I could see what this man had wrought.

And I looked, and I saw that it was good.

Boris asked for ten dollars, a price that seemed, as I looked and preened in the giant mirror, far too good to be true, especially for New York. Walking out the door, and back home, I felt like a new man, holding my head high—easier to do without two months of hair growth weighing it down, and singing the praises of Boris. I’ve been back since, and I will be back again.

What does it mean to be nice?

It might be easier to say what being nice doesn’t mean. Being nice is not the same as being milquetoast. It doesn’t mean not having firm, honest opinions. It doesn’t mean being someone people walk all over. It also doesn’t mean the Minnesota nice of passive aggression. To me, being nice, as a virtue, is about two things: discretion and delivery. Discretion is the fine art of knowing what to say, how to say it, and when. A quick example is, say, the person next to you at work constantly playing loud, terrible music at you. It’s very easy to walk over and yell at them. It’s easy to be passive-aggressive and turn your music up, or theirs down when they go to the bathroom. As I mentioned last week, however, these aren’t likely to affect someone else’s behavior. A carefully worded, polite, friendly comment, with a proposed behavior suggestion for both of you is more likely to be effective.

Unless they’re an unrepentant jerk, but those are rarer than we imagine.

Discretion is also about where we say things. You’re polite, one hopes, to the jerk with the bad music taste in the office. At home, to your partner, you can let it spill. Every social environment has its own level of acceptable discourse about itself and its inhabitants. I’ve been in work environments where taking the piss out of your co-workers was de rigeur, and places where a misplaced word can have long-term consequences. If you’re not sure, a safe default is “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

This is hard stuff, especially at first. If you’re used to being brusque and callous to the point where it’s second nature, try faking it until you make it. With practice—and I do not suggest trying this without practicing first—fake niceness (without the layer of passive-aggression) is indistinguishable enough from the real thing. In any job that involves face-to-face interaction with a fickle and often rude public, dealing with a friendly face, even if it’s an act, is often enough to bring some of the rudest people to their senses. If you’ve ever been to a Disney theme park, you’ve likely seen this in action. David Foster Wallace called it the “Professional Smile,” and noted the effect not receiving it has on how you walk away from an interaction: it’s not good.

Don’t expect to change the way you think of people, and certainly not overnight. What is more important is how you act with people. Given enough time, it’s possible that you will become sincere and nice in how you deal with people. Maybe. Once it feels real to you, as long as there’s no nagging guilt that inevitably comes with a bad interaction, and as long as the person you’re dealing with walks away with a positive impression, you’re doing the right thing. Like so much, this all comes down to mindfulness. Taking a step back from your actions and being aware of the choices you make in interacting with others goes a long way to ensuring you come off as nice. There are enough proverbs about the utility of holding ones tongue that it’s pointless to repeat them here. Remember: you do have a choice about what to say and how to say it. Take time and aim. When you shoot your mouth off from the hip, as it were, you risk missing, and you risk hurting yourself and others. This isn’t cheap, liberal arts relativism. It’s dealing with people.

And, hey, I’m not perfect. Nor do I aspire to be. However, the day will come, sooner than later, when a perfect confluence of events will tax my patience to the limit. My alarm clock won’t go off. The subway will break down, making me late for work. I won’t have had my morning coffee. I’ll find out I had an appointment I forgot about. The cashier won’t give me my change when I got lunch. It rained and I forgot an umbrella. Then, someone will say something to push me over the edge. How one deals with that is the ultimate test of how well you can maintain your niceness.

There’s a time and place to say your piece, and a time and a place to shut your mouth. Generally, unsolicited comments don’t go over well with the recipient, whether you deliver it in a friendly manner, or a sotto voiced rejoinder after an encounter. In cases like these, it’s best to learn to let it go, and not let these things get to you. After all, “what do you care?” In those cases where someone sincerely wants an opinion, don’t be cruel. Be honest, be frank, and be sincere, but by no means be cruel. Everybody has a reason why they do what they do. That doesn’t mean you understand it. It also doesn’t mean they understand it. When dealing with other people, unless you’re Charles Xavier, you don’t have the ability to control how they think or act. You can encourage and suggest, but the way you do it will have a huge impact on how well it goes over. And there are no guarantees.

This is hard. It’s hard to balance being nice with being honest, and being strong. It’s hard to bite your tongue when someone’s goading you, directly or indirectly. It’s very hard to get that angry, threatened part of your brain to stand down. Hard, however, is not the same as impossible. It all comes back to mindfulness. Slow down, step back, think before you speak, or type, or click “Submit” and see if this is going to actually help matters. And, of course, in the event you do blow it and wreck someone’s mood, step on someone’s toes, and make the situation worse, rather than feed the cycle, apologize and move on. Or, just move on, if you have to. I think, however, the results of being nice pay off in the long run, far better than the initial pleasures of snark. Try it for yourself, and see.

It’s hard to be nice, these days.

It seems to me, now more than ever, that our interactions with others often turns into the trading of barbs. Any opinion expressed runs the risk of being reacted to with snark. [1] I know I’m not the only person who sees this. My friend Andrew Marvin touched on this a few months ago.

We allow other people to affect ourselves like this all the time. It’s a perfectly natural, human thing. Of course we should care about what our loved ones think. But when it comes to minutia—like what someone’s drinking—I can’t see any worthwhile reason to care.

Ask yourself, “How does this person’s decision affect me?”
If the answer is that it doesn’t, that’s great. Let go, and become a little bit more free.

If the answer is something negative, ask yourself why. Is it a good reason, or is it kind of silly?

These are important things to ask, but another important thing to ask is why we are compelled to even remark? What is the root of the snark problem? Why is so much of my dialogue, and other people’s, so concerned with negativity? What purpose does snark serve, and what drives us to use it when there are far more constructive means of communication at our disposal?

For me, the problem took focus as we wrapped up Episode 5 of Crush On Radio. What I intended to be a sedate discussion on special editions of albums and their bonus tracks became a very opinionated, and often very nasty rant on my part. After we wrapped up, I immediately laid down a rule for the show that we can’t have another episode that is all griping and snark. It’s not constructive and contrary to the spirit of the show, which is about sharing music and stories about music with people.

What makes avoiding being snarky so difficult is that it’s omnipresent in society, and on the Internet especially. One can’t state an opinion in a public forum without having at least one person insult not only your opinion, but you. For an example, look at the comments on almost any story on a newspaper website. No matter what the topic, politics, culture, technology, food, you’re bound to say something that will set someone else off. After enough of this, it becomes natural to take the defensive position and pepper your statement of public opinion with harsh invective from the start.

Who knows the reason for this? Some suggest the anonymity afforded by our means of communicating with each other frees up the asshole that lurks within us all.[2] There are multiple attempts to deal with the problem in the digital sphere, ranging from “Karma” systems such as on Reddit to enforced “identity” systems like on Google Plus. The effect on behavior varies depending on the method, but nothing ever can completely remove the snark problem, short of making the entire site read-only. [3]

The worst part of all this snark is that it’s not constructive. Even if there’s something of value buried beneath the vitriol, it doesn’t get through. When someone is snarky, even if the point they make is valid, it automatically puts the recipient on the defensive. They don’t take the time to ponder the valid point, they only defend themselves harder. Facts already have a tendency to make people who disagree with them strengthen their disbelief. Delivering a valid statement in a way that is going to cause offense certainly isn’t going to help.

It’s a leap to say that the problem of snark in offline life, whether we speak it aloud or not, is a direct result of Internet-based snark. Despite this, immersing oneself in this well of negativity, anger and trolling has to have some effect on how we conduct ourselves when we’re away from it. Was I so willing to be an aggressively sarcastic, snarky jerk—even if it’s in my head—before I got involved in online discourse? Who can tell? Either way, as I get older and, presumably, wiser, I see this becoming a problem for myself and others. Since I can’t change their behavior, I’ll have to start with myself.

Next week, I’ll be proposing a Solution