The problem with social networks is that everyone else likes them, too
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Version 0 of 1. Arthur C Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I’d add that any sufficiently populous online community is indistinguishable from Livejournal. More specifically, the narrative arc of an online community mirrors the one that played out on Livejournal, the diary and blogging network that was popular in the 2000s. Livejournal started as a place where you talked almost exclusively to your friends, or at least some of your friends; one of its most appealing features was the ability to finely tune which people could see each of your posts. When I joined in 2001, you needed an invite code to start an account; you could only sign up if someone wanted to talk to and hear from you. Then people started adding friends of friends. Communities were introduced, so you could meet people with shared interests. Livejournal became a site for making friends, not just talking to them. The service grew to 1m users, then 2m, then 5m. Then it got sold, and people freaked out; there were rumors that the new owners would nuke existing accounts. (They did not.) The site grew to 10, 12, 14m users. In the communities, people started fighting. They bickered, they picked on each other, they flounced and unfriended and came back and did it again. The tone shifted from “small gathering” to “exciting party” to “mosh pit.” The top brass couldn’t always keep up with the needs of so many, and people were furious every time they felt mistreated or underserved. And finally, feeling demoralized by the contentious atmosphere and let down by the admins, users started to drift away. That’s the arc: intimacy to exploration to disgust to abandonment. Every community starts small: a few friends, a “just setting up my twttr”. You assume that everything you say is read only by people you know. Then it expands, and initial expansion is a rush – you meet new people, and in the way of the internet, you do not just like them: they are your soulmates. You love them, you want to have their babies, you want to move with them to a convent in France. It expands more, and the more users there are, the more public and vulnerable everything feels, and the more likely someone will pick a fight. You can no longer trust your audience. Around the same time, you start to feel that you can no longer trust the site, either. Imperfections in dealing with security issues or abuse become widespread because the user base is so large. This will happen every time, with every social network, no matter how idealistic its manifesto; it is simply a matter of size. User bases can, and regularly do, expand to a much greater scale than any network can support. Twitter and Facebook and all the rest might have felt like some kind of online Burning Man at first, an exhilarating gathering of the like-minded and strange, but the thing about Burning Man is that Burning Man is outdoors. It can, in theory, expand until it reaches the limits of the desert (which, thanks to climate change, could be basically forever). A social network is more like a large indoor concert: the more people you pack in, the more you will hate every other person there; they’re making you sweaty and you can’t see and every time you move you get jabbed in the ribs even if the person didn’t mean to do it – but the more people there are, the more likely it is that someone around you is a jerk and really means it. Eventually, an alternative comes along, and a bunch of people gradually strike out and sets up camp somewhere new, forgetting that the problem wasn’t really the particular site, or the app, or the company in charge, but the fact that it was full to bursting with humans. It’s like packing up and moving houses because you hate your furniture. There’s an upside to this inevitable decay. Once everyone leaves, the skeletonized site is exposed for what it really is – or what it was built to be, before users made it a reflection of their own dysfunction. Livejournal is still home to digital hermits, people who have found, that once the crowd thinned out, the infrastructure actually did what we still wanted it to do; it’s more networked than a blog, has better privacy controls than Medium and supports long posts better than Facebook. The abandoned relics of the online world show us what the internet could have been if it weren’t for all the damn users. Maybe the next time we’re angry at Twitter or Facebook, we should go find a moribund network to squat in – fix up our little corner of it, enjoy the silence and the space for a bit before it inevitably goes the way of Orkut. Just don’t tell anyone else, or they’ll all want (back) in. |