A glove in a field
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A Short Lived Interest in Substack Notes

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

When I heard about Substack Notes I felt an interest in the project. I liked the idea of a site where we could write long form posts on one side, and short form posts on the other. I liked the idea of having conversations with people and creating new connections. That’s why I use social media and that’s what makes social media social, rather than a news website or some other form of website. 

The flaw emerged in two manners. The first is when content creators showed their huge growth in subscribers. It went from being a social network to an influencer network. It went from conversations on a human scale to lecture hall, or even stadium monologues. It went from being about individuals listening to each other, to influencers talking at people, but no longer being able to hear and interact. It went to being a broadcast platform. 

The second flaw is the FOMO that is caused by giving people with hundreds of paying subscribers a verified tick. It creates a two class social network. You have normal people, using it as a social network, and the others monologuing. 

People like to say “You can use the social network as you like” but this isn’t true. This isn’t possible. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are aol about the influencers, rather than about individuals. It becomes impossible to find organic conversations because you’re always thrown into a big crowd rather than a small gathering. The result is trolling, but also solitude and loneliness. Social media should neutralise loneliness, not exacerbate it. 

That’s why I like WordPress.com, and wordpress.org. With both aspects of the same project you have a community, without it being a competition. Social networks should be about conviviality, not a faceless mass. 

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube force us to see what the mass audience people are doing, at the cost of making ordinary people and creators invisible. It encourages introverts to withdraw, rather than participate. 

Years ago I realised that if you’re an introvert, and you go out to socialise, you’re just there to flatter the ego of the extrovert that everyone is listening to. If you’re an introvert and quiet, or not as well spoken as others you are invisible. You will gain as much, by staying home, as going out. Social media has become the same. 

Back in 2007 I asked “But what about the ROI of Twitter and Facebook users?” In 2023 not only has this question not been heard, but the mistake is spreading. I’d rather work on projects than waste time on networks where I am invisible. 

Conclusion

By showing graphs of how readership exploded for some users on Substack, and by adding “this person has hundreds of paying subscribers Substack created a class system on their social network that I left Twitter to avoid. If Mastodon, Substack and other alternatives all have the same flaws as Twitter, then why do we leave Twitter? Why waste thousands of hours rebuilding a social network? That’s why I am blogging again, because this is an investment of my time, rather than a waste of it. It is an amusing paradox that the pandemic, rather than help social networks thrive, has destroyed them. 

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MicroBlogging and I
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MicroBlogging and I

Byrichard

Since 2006 I have thought of Twitter, Jaiku, Mastodon and Plurk as conversation channels, rather than microblogging. I go to these places and use them as chatroooms rather than microblogs. If I want to blog I have my full scale blog. This website, to keep me entertained.


I bring this up because at lunchtime today, the time at which I usually get tired with social media, two people frustrated me. One person asked for what reason Musk should have been stopped from buying twitter. The second said that without hashtags they wouldn’t be able to find content on Mastodon.


I might be argumentative on social media but that is not why I use social media. Ideally I want to use social media to have pleasant conversations that eventually lead to me wanting to meet people in person, or failing that, to collaborate online on projects. This lunchtime I found two arguments and my reaction was “I don’t want to invest hundreds or thousands of hours on a social network, like Mastodon, to have it be as big of a waste of time, as twitter, in recent years. I use social media to be social, not to argue.


Social media is an investment in time, attention and more. I stopped using Facebook and Instagram because I felt I was making money for others, without having any benefit of my own. The more posts you see, the more Instagram and Facebook earned. In the end I was tired of giving them a steady stream of cash. At the time I thought, If I took the time I spent on IG and FB and invested it on my own website then it would do better, and I’d get just as much engagement. This is tongue in cheek. If I am being ignored I might as well be ignored on my own website.


At the end of today I will have gone two days without tweeting. If I manage two weeks then I will have kicked the habit. I need to find a replacement. Blogging is one productive distraction.

Zero Minutes Per Week on Facebook

Zero Minutes Per Week on Facebook

Byrichard

I noticed that Facebook has a way of letting you know how badly you are addicted to their website. In the process I learned that I spent zero minutes on their website this week, and one minute last week. I do not spend time on their website because it fails to provide me with a community that I want to interact with on a daily basis. There are a number of reasons for this but the key reason is that they spent so much effort trying to make the timeline more addictive that they made it repulsive.


Irrelevant Content from Algorithms


The timeline is repulsive because it shows too many adverts, whether for groups, for products, for promoted posts and more. These are irrelevant, and if shown at too high a rate they become toxic. They also stop you from seeing the content that you want to engage with, i.e. posts by friends. Facebook has become a network of strangers talking to strangers, and noise. We see others, but we are not seen. If that is toxic to me, imagine the impact on others. Instagram, too, has this flaw.


Questionable Morals


The second reason is to do with Facebook’s reputation for enabling, or at least not removing extremist content for months or even seasons. They sometimes seem to remove it once it is no longer needed, rather than when it causes the most damage.


FOMO and trolling


The two strongest push factors were FOMO and trolling. Facebook had a way of reminding us that not everyone is self isolating during this pandemic, or of reminding us that not everyone is in solitude. When you are not conversing with people, you are only seeing an idealised representation of their lives, then you begin to feel down about your own life. It makes you wish the pandemic would end, so that you could resume socialising, meeting people, and maybe even having something, other than social media, to come home to.


The second one was virulent trolling. In normal times you would put up with communities where you are being trolled because you can still plan activities in the physical world. During a pandemic however, if you get trolled you have no reason to put up with it, and a survival strategy is to leave the community. Eventually I took a serious break from twitter that has lasted for almost the entire pandemic.


Not A Social Media Detox


What I am writing about is not a social media detox. My aim is not to take a break from social media. My aim was to take a break from, and cut ties with a community that is toxic, both through the ways it pushes rubbish into your timelines, but also by the toxic people that interact on the platform. When you are flamed twice within the space of days, and when you are tired of scrolling through irrelevant content, you eventually decide that the Return on Investment, ROI, as a user, is less than it is worth to keep using a service.


I have had the same realisation with Instagram, which is part of the same problematic social network. Meta. Everything Meta touches, becomes unhealthy for users to use, and now they want to go into the metaverse. I will not use AR and VR via such a company. They do not have the required moral standards for me to trust them with something immersive.


One of the drawbacks to dumping Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other products, is that you become disconnected from the social networks that have the biggest monopoly. If you do not use these networks you are socially excluded. Too many products are built off of Facebook’s user login system now. You lose access to some apps, web services, and to some communities. During a pandemic this contributes to the sense of isolation.


I Don’t Miss Either


I don’t miss either Facebook or Instagram because they stopped being about a network of friends years ago. They became more and more of a waste of time, and more of a way to see how I wish my life was different. That would be positive, if we were all on the same life path, but we are not, especially during the pandemic. The standard model life that we saw on Facebook and Instagram stopped being real. It became an unhealthy illusion. It also led to a sense of isolation. That sense of isolation is why a Facebook and Instagram break was needed. You don’t long for a different life every day. You can more easily live in the moment.


Very Few Interactions


One thing that hurt, when I used Facebook, but also Instagram, was seeing other people get twenty or more likes, and getting conversations started via their content. Seeing that I was being ignored was painful, but it also led me to another thought. If I am being ignored on FB and IG, where I am giving them my attention, and content for free, then I might as well give over that time to my blog, and at least this way I achieve something positive. It gets very little attention, but it is “me time” as you would see many people say. It is time that I devote to thinking, and writing. In effect I am practicing mindfulness.


A Lifestyle, Not An Addiction


For years I have argued that social media and social networks should be about a lifestyle rather than an addiction. Google and Twitter, although flawed, in some ways, do not treat us like addicts. They treat us like individuals, and the same is true of Wordpress.com. We are a community of writers and commenters, who write, and occassionally people read what we have written. Sometimes they even comment. The goal isn’t to have a conversation. The aim is to read about someone else’s experiences. The web should be a healthy place, to talk online, while waiting for another opportunity to meet offline, as it was in 2006-2007.


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Social Media and the Lizard brain

Byrichard

I wanted to write about Social Media and the Lizard brain. My experience of information technology and Social Media is that it is a great tool for people from different backgrounds to come together and have a calm and logical conversation. Some people believe that “we need a social media with heart that gives us time to think.” I strongly believe that the culprit is not social media but rather the way people are taught to think in general and how the stigmatisation of online interactions has led people to feel negative when using social media.

With a smartphone in your hand, System 1 thinking becomes the dominant mode of thought. Nobody can handle the volume of data in 2016 without relying on ifeelings to come up with instantaneous responses, often triggered by how you see others reacting. There is less scope for deliberation and discussion – the pressure is to make a snap judgment and move on. I love this film, this article is deplorable/fantastic or politician X is a welcome breath of fresh air/duplicitous bastard.

This is an erroneous view. The World Wide Web is a powerful social tool because it allows us to think for a week or two before posting a reaction. Imagine that you are reading a printed newspaper article and you are offended. You write a letter the same day in the hope that it will be published as a reaction to the article. You react without the time to think. Once you send the letter it cannot be edited.

Social media and the World Wide Web allow two things. They allow you to read around the subject. Rather than write based on anger and emotion you can study the topic you are responding to. You can write on reaction, you can rewrite it. You can share that reaction. You can change your mind and you can delete it.

I find it an interesting paradox that articles are written about how Social media require us to use the lizard brain rather than reflect when I personally find the opposite to be the case.

System 2 thinking is slower and more deliberative. You marshal evidence, you exercise judgment, you discuss with others and you try to arrive at conclusions

When I am unfamiliar with a topic I go to Wikipedia to familiarise myself with a topic and there is a good chance that I will read articles on the subject. I really appreciate that in modern life when we find interest in a new topic we can either buy e-books or audiobooks in order to study topics in depth. We start the day with limited knowledge about a specific topic and by the end of that same day, we have enough background information to join the conversation.

To use a cliché social media is not the villain that people are making it out to be. Social media is a conversational tool and a democratising opportunity. When people are taught to think independently, when people are taught to reason, and when people are taught to research topics before writing a response they are productive.

I have a rule. If my response takes more than 140 characters I will drop by Facebook or Google Plus. If it is longer than a paragraph I will write a blog post. By following this logic, emotion is taken out of the post.

Marshall McLuhan talked about hot and cold media decades ago. Social media is a cold medium. The audience needs to do the work. The audience needs to fill in the gaps. Parents, Schools and Universities need to teach people to understand the limitations of the media they are using whilst at the same time teaching them to be critical, to find more than one source before forming an opinion. The problem is not with the medium but with the way in which people are prepared for the new medium.

Social Media Silos

Social Media Silos

Byrichard

Years ago we heard that Facebook was a silo. What was meant by this term is that FaceBook would pull content into its social network and behave like a portal, without allowing people to leave. It encouraged people to see the World Wide Web as Facebook and nothing else. For a while it worked.


Zynga and The Death of Conversation


When FB was young, and vibrant it was a network of friends having a chat, until Zynga came along. When Zynga came along it went from being a conversational website to a gaming site. It became a waste of time in the eyes of many. It went from being a way of connecting with uni friends and colleagues to being a source of time wasting.


As if that wasn’t enough FB was used to manufacture consent for the Far Right groups. It helped Brexit, it helped Drumpf. It even helped genocide and experimented with making people depressed. It never apologised.


It bought Whatsapp and Instagram so I stopped using both apps.


Twitter Requires a Login


Quite a few of the Right Wing Websites require a login. Some of them are even geoblocked to restrict who can see, and participate in conversations. Although Twitter was text based it was a web portal for many, for a decade and a half. It had become a niche website where people went for a chat, shared news and current affairs, and kept up to date with people and topics that interested them. Musk destroyed that convivial atmosphere, which had already atrophied beforehand, but he made it worse.


Required Login


Another Perspective


The SubRedditor Victory


Last night and this morning I read that Reddit has seen its valuation decline as a result of the protests by subredditors. I see this as a victory. I don’t care about third party apps, or other reasons for the protest. I supported the protest because I’m tired of social media giants and venture capitalists purchasing web communities, and treating them as cash cows, rather than communities.


Twitter, Facebook and Reddit are, or at least were, communities. Communities should not be up for sale. Communities should be alive, healthy and vibrant. They should be about conversations and connecting people.


This morning, and last night I saw that the New York Times has yet another article about how to help teenagers ween themselves off of their social media addiction. For decades I have writtena about social media as a lifestyle, as a modern way of socialising. For decades Venture Capitalist Social Media has told us “Social media is bad”, “social media is addictive”. If it’s either of these things it is because of the social media companies that choose to ignore ethics, morality and corporate social responsability, rather than because the medium is bad. Social media is a blank canvas. We make it healthy, or unhealthy, by how we interact with it. VCSM is toxic. There is no doubt about that, but that’s why it’s good for FB, Twitter and Reddit to silo themselves. Keep the toxicity within.


Valuation Decline


The Early Web and Now


In the early days of the World Wide Web we could pay for a server, and then we could install PHPpb and other web forum software on our sites and we could self host, or contribute to the communities that meant something to us. The same is true in 2023. The tools are better. We have the Twitter/Facebook clone with Mastodon, Calckey and the Fediverse. We have Kbin and Lemmy for the threadiverse, so we can join or start our own instances. Finally we have Peertube and Pixelfed as YouTube and Instagram replacements. The future is open source and crowdfunded. Remember that this is the natural status quo. The Social Media giant age was an aberation on the World Wide Web. It’s nice to see that it has ended.


Attract, Don’t Repulse


There is a paradox in the social media giants pushing users and developers away just at the moment when seducing users, and developers is most important. Remember that Jaiku was like Twitter and Identi.ca was like Twitter. Both failed because Twitter had more gravity, so it attracted people to it, and they never left, until a few weeks ago. Reddit, Instagram and Twitter are easy to clone with the tools that we have available today. Today social media companies should be doing everything they can to keep people from jumping ship. The social media giants are showing apathy towards their users, and their users have somewhere to flee too.


And Finally


Now that the Social Media Giants are making mistakes and driving people away I am excited. I am excited by the prospect of being able to join smaller, more niche communities, and bouncing around from instance to instance, rather than being stuck on one of the giant monoliths. Now is a time when we can build and experiment again, on a human scale, a SuperSoaker scale, rather than trying to fill a syringe with a firehose.

Who Killed Twitter – My Opinion
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Who Killed Twitter – My Opinion

Byrichard

Two authors wrote books. In these books they speak about whether Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk killed twitter. The answer is neither. If Twitter was alive and healthy it would never have been sold to an individual for four times its value, because its growth potential would have made this absurd.

Twitter died by 2007, with the advent of hashtags. That’s when twitter went from being a community of friends to being a community of strangers trying to get a million followers, and using hashtags to jump into conversations that they were not devoted to. At the first tuttle meetups and tweetups everyone knew everyone else from twitter. No one was a stranger to anyone else.

It’s when I went to a tweetup and I heard someone say “i’m not really a twitter user, I just came to the tweetup because it’s being hyped up.” That’s when twitter declined even more.

If we fast forward by a little more than a decade I believe that the pandemic killed Twitter, and Social Media. I believe this because before the pandemic normal people were on Facebook, and possibly Reddit and other social networks but they were not on Twitter. To a large extent they weren’t on FB either.

During the pandemic social media became more unpleasant. Trolling became more common. Trolling is the reason I dumped facebook for two to three years. Amplified loneliness is why I dumped Instagram and never returned.

The idea that Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk killed twitter is erroneous. Marketers did. Public relations firms did. People who took a utilitarian view of social media killed Twitter.

Twitter was fantastic, when it was a network of friends chatting with friends. It stopped being that in 2007-2008. I still used it but my ROI had declined dramatically.

Is this due to moving from London to Switzerland? I don’t think so. I just think that Twitter was best, when it had value to small communities, rather than marketers, public relations people and other groups with a utilitarian agenda.

Articles like this one are never written by people who live and breath social media. They are written by outsiders looking in. We could read them, but because of my perspective they have no value. By perspective I mean my attitude towards social networks and social media.

And Finally

Twitter wasn’t killed by Dorsey or Musk. It was killed by the people who took a utilitarian approach to social media. They turned Twitter from a tool for communities to have conversations, and build projects together to a place where marketers and public relations firms could hijack conversations, and make it about following celebraties, rather than conversations.

When Twitter pivoted from being a social network to social media, it became less interesting. I deleted my first twitter account by 2008 or so, and only returned because Swiss television interviewed me about the social network.

When Musk bought Twitter it was already worthless.

The End of an Era

There was a time when Twitter was Twitter, Facebook was Facebook, Instagram was Instagram and Whatsapp was whatsapp. Over time they have all been bought or rebranded, and the things that made them so fantastic were destroyed. Society saw social media as an addiction. This attitude destroyed social networks.

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Threaded conversations and community

Byrichard

From the 1970s to 2007 we had threaded conversations through bulletin boards, forums, groups and other centralising discussion points. For a brief window of about two years conversations became so captivating that people wanted to meet in person as strong friendships were established. By 2009-2010 the threaded and personal conversations between web users was hijacked by “social media” marketers and so the speed of conversation and quality of interactions collapsed. In it’s place hashtags would replace user engagement with quick metrics.

The golden age of conversation has been replaced by the dark ages of indifference. Every day that we spend online we see how disengaged people have become. Look at twitter. Do you still see user to user conversations. Look at Facebook. Do you still see engaging content and passionate conversations? I see a waste of time. The conversations which were taking place have been replaced by dumbed down headlines and sensationalist content.

For several years we have heard about how corporations should not have access to our data because of what they will do with it. From where I am surfing the web and interacting with the online community I see a more serious problem. I see that as the chance of individual to individual conversations has decreased so the quality of shared articles, videos and other content has been dumbed down. This is evident on Facebook and Twitter. These networks are becoming ghost towns. They have millions of user profiles that are slowly going dormant.

That social media networks are going dormant is excellent. Instead of wasting time with Ello, Diaspora and other solutions I believe that going back to the blogging habit will benefit everyone. It is decentralised, it is interest based and it is long form. Through Worpdress.org tools, through Disqus and other solutions so our ability to connect and communicate is improved. It forces us to be positive and to be accountable. Everything that you share can contribute to your reputation and help share your passions. We should not be hidden behind silos and we should not be anonymous. We need to break the twitter and Facebook duopoly.

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