I was an early user on Twitter, on Facebook and a host of other early social networks. I still remember how fun it was in 2008-2009 on Twitter, how many fun conversation I had there.
But Twitter was never meant to stay like that. Once they started to get bigger, problems came along.
Almost every platform that attempts to be a safe place for a certain type of person falls flat on their face with this problem of scale. You can promise to be moderation free, or simply not have the time to do it, but the fact is it’s impossible to run a platform that doesn’t have to do moderation.
Start with the spam you’ll inevitably get once there are enough users. Then the things you legally have to take down — abuse, copyright material etc. Once you reach a critical mass of users, then comes the algorithmic feed decisions due to lack of engagement and inability for users to keep up. This too is an inevitability as users can’t decide if their posts will be seen or not and start to post less if action isn’t taken.
All platforms that need engagement or show adverts will devolve into the same state eventually. Nothing will ever ‘fix’ social media. Scale kills almost everything, there is a huge benifit to not being where everyone is. Stay small.
Quote from Greg Morris and you should read the rest of the article, to get the context.
This is one of the reasons I still have a personal blog, 17 years after starting one. Because it’s my own small space.
