this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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That was an excellent if somewhat overwrought read (it's Medium that's almost expected). And it's hitting on a fear I've had about the current state of the internet for a while now.
I think we do need to acknowledge, though, that a lot of this has to do with people. The "average users", they simply don't care enough about any of this. I don't like the farm animal comparisons because it's dehumanizing and mean, but it really is very unfortunate how many patterns of user behavior reveal a majority of users that are just as easy to corral.
We can talk all we like about the corporate machinations of Zuckerberg, but at the end of the day, Facebook killed Myspace for one very simple reason: people follow other people. Centralization is the end result of humans searching out the social part of social media, which means they gather, and tend to stay put unless everyone else moves as well, at the same time.
Platforms gain incredible power if the herd settles in their lands, and become virtually immune to pushback from poor decisions until they hit Musk level insanity. It should not have taken this long for people to seek a Twitter alternative, or a Reddit one for that matter. Once the herd settles, they'll suffer just about anything to avoid having to move.
And I don't know if there's a good answer to this problem. Especially now that competition is so sparce and alternative platforms barely see a trickle of active use compared to the giants.
I feel what you feel, and I agree with the dehumanizing comparison, but it is what it is. I just can't understand the mentality of the herd because it highlights a completely different set of priorities from that of good social media environment. So I hold that comparison to all its negative contempt.
Threads comes up with minimal advertising and people join it without really caring what it does and how well it does. It comes with many of the same usability and content discoverability issues that Twitter had on a its worst of days. The hierarchy of sponsored content vs follower content vs follower interaction vs follower-of-follower content vs whatever the hell further down this clown parade Threads openly does is just completely whack. And it is still just as obfuscated as the rest in terms of being favored by its algorithm, plus monetization of content is a complete question mark. And yet people still join, and not any random person, but the every-person and the famous and the political. AOC herself ignores Mastodon and makes up an excuse, but is on Threads day one.
And Why? Why join a mediocre, underbaked, and by the numbers platform that basically doesn't even innovate on the previous one? Because of the promise.
The promise it could be "The Next Big Thing".
Not saying I'm above it. Not saying there's superiority in standing to opposition to this or anything. For every thing I care about here, there will be many other things I don't and where I frustrate someone. But it still does make me overall more jaded about the world regardless.
A trickle always precedes a flood :)
As the late great Thomas Jefferson once wrote:
Funny how we keep seeing this same tendency play out in soooo many ways in so many contexts.
If the yoke fits...