Confused thoughts: Social media and the blog-form
(an old post from cohost, mid 2024. Reposting to test out this website.)
I think I have gone from hating social media to only disliking it. Maybe. Still, I think I am starting to figure out what my problems with social media as it is are. And I think a lot of it has to do with almost all of social media being a type of ephemeral blog platform
Blogification
From what I remember, social media wasn’t always like this. The clearest examples of (early?) blog type-social media were twitter and tumblr – despite their different vibes they were both called microblogging services. Basically: you follow people’s microblogs and get their content in a single stream (not really unlike rss readers, I suppose). From what I understand, most of social media today basically follow this format – both new big ones like tiktok, and older ones like facebook (a lot of people still use facebook). You follow people, and there’s a stream of their content – these days usually mediated through an algorithm.
And the stream is really the main form of seeing Content these days. The linear scrolling of an always-updating is pretty intuitive, but it’s not the only way to design a website (or app). From what I can recall, the domination of the shape of the stream has spread across platforms – I have a vague memory of the facebook of 15 years ago placing much less focus on the then-linear timeline, than the current fronting of it (even as the platform retains many non-timeline features like groups, events etc.).
For me, the stream has become so ubiquitous that seeing the problems can become kinda difficult. I’m so used to my timelines on a few big platforms being the gateway to whatever else is out there, that recognising the limitations has become harder
Still, I think I can somewhat abstractly still point out two fundamental problems: one being of person-orientation, the other being of temporality.
Person and Topic
I think I’ve heard it framed like this: once upon a time, websites were personal “gardens”, they were built by people with enough know-how to program their own place. As the internet spread, the need for easy tools to make personal sites increased. The result of this was the victory of the blog-format – a series of blogposts, chronologically ordered. This ultimately ended the diversity of personal websites.
Microblogs then, is this form of personal website turned into a centralised platform. Among other things, this made discoverability easy through easy sharing (reblogging, retweeting), and the Content consumer could find all their favourite microblogposts in one place.
What’s important to me with this crude history is that the format of these platforms is fundamentally person-oriented. To contrast: A web forum was a community centred around some common topic (even if this was, say, one dude’s webcomic).
In the first instance, you follow people, or accounts, on twitter, not topics. Even as microblogging has changed pretty significantly from ye olde macroblog, this is still true. This fundamental structure has meant a lot of how things have turned out, I think. Even if (micro)blogging wasn’t the genesis of what became the influencer, I’m sure it has helped it along. Regardless, the social media poster has to deal with people following them, and not just their content, even if X content was the impetus for following. Opposite, as a consumer you cannot just follow X content that person N posts, you have to take the whole package of whatever their account has to offer. This gives certain social dynamics, but I shan’t elaborate.
The point is: you are, for example, not free to just look at someone’s art, you have to look at all their other postings as well, if you want to catch the art. As a poster, all your interests and acts get bunched together – there’s no easy way to compartmentalise.
As this has spread across basically all platforms (I’ll get to reddit), you are left with an online landscape where you primarily interact with the world wide web through persons – or Accounts – and algorithms.
Sidenote on algorithms
I assume there are many (advertising/profit-related) reasons why algorithms over a few years have become so dominant in the social media landscape, but I think that they also solve a fundamental problem of a person-oriented Content experience: discoverability can be very difficult.
I have a hunch this difficulty is a direct consequence of person- and not topic-orientation. Without an algorithm, If you don’t already know the right posters before you enter the site, finding what you want can be very difficult.
(Personally, I distinctly remember that when I first went to twitter in 2008, it was to follow people I already recognised from forums, not to find new people. And even now, I can find the whole entering a new platform thing difficult – even tiktok’s pretty good algorithm isn’t enough to sway me to spending much time on the platform.)
So: you bring in algorithms, because there are limits to what people share, and when it comes to tags, people aren’t necessarily good at using them as both posters and consumers.
Maybe? Anyhow.
Temporality
The other big issue is the temporality of these platforms. This is pretty straightforward: the timeline is first and foremost newest-first, even if mediated by shares and/or algorithms pushing up slightly older posts.
There are several things about this temporality to criticise, but my specific concern is that you can’t have long-running discussions. This also affects the most forum-like big platform: Reddit. Reddit is at least topic-oriented, but (in addition to its upvote system) any thread gets quickly buried and eventually locked. There’s no bumping (reviving) of old discussions – everything is ephemeral like on other platforms. The same discussions and facts get rehashed, and nothing is ever learned on a macro-level.
What’s been lost?
Given this, its easy to be nostalgic for the older internet – forums and gallery sites like deviantart have been made irrelevant by the great shift to social media. I’d call it a migration, but I’m not sure it’s all migration: many people (“normies”) have become Online primarily through social media – in some sense, the old forum users might have been of less relevance to their dominance, maybe?
Still, there are things that I think have been lost. There are some things social media does not, and think due to their fundamental structure cannot give me. Figuring those out as well is a way of seeing what’s wrong with the current landscape (for me). So.
Discovery
Even with algorithms, I personally struggle to find interesting Content. Even if tiktok’s much-praised algorithm brings me interesting stuff, it all gets same-y pretty quickly – and not in a good way. I find it difficult to “organically” (whatever that means) dive into a topic and discover new things within it.
Searching blindly gets too broad and unfiltered, and tags are well, chaotic.
Community
I know there are communities on these platforms – fandom communities, queer communities, artist communities etc. However, these seem to me to mostly be amorphous blobs, or just cliques of cool posters and their entourages. No real common culture is created, and no “community space” is created.
Compare forums: you created a community around a topic, but from this starting point you usually end up with off-topic sections and discussion that widen the scope of the community for those who want to do that.
The important distinction is that forums are topic-oriented, whereas even communities on twitter or tumblr are person-oriented. If you follow another person interested in X topic as part of the community, you have to deal with whatever else they’re interested in as well. In a topic-based community like a forum, that person would relegate their off-topic discussion to the appropriate section/thread in the forum, or another place altogether.
Diversity (of sorts)
Recently I’ve a couple of times encountered snippets of older online/nerd culture and amateur (fan)art. What struck me is the vast range of skill levels side by side, but also the passion of the DIY artists. Personally, I enjoy seeing this kind of range of skill levels, at least when the creator is passionate about something. However, on big platforms everything is squeaky clean – it seems to be seen, you already have to be a professional working at an insanely quick pace, more or less – or make fanart of a currently popular thing (AI “art” seems to me the logical conclusion of this tendency).
Of course, people who aren’t perfect posters exist, but finding these people within the endless deluge of posts, where there is no direction to walk in to find anything, is nigh-impossible – you (artist or viewer) need dumb luck, or to be #blessed by the algorithm.
Since everything is person-oriented, it seems to me you can easily get caught in the sphere of given groups of people, and not of a given topic.
The lack of solutions
It might be tempting to go back to the old structures – forums, gallery sites, personal websites. But I’m not sure how far that will take us. People abandoned these for what at least party might have been good reasons. Forums were run by petty hobbyist kings, a personal website is hard to make, etc. (personally I see few problems with gallery sites, but I’m not an artist – maybe discovery?).
On the other hands, I think recent attempts to go beyond the Big Platforms have failed, because they keep the fundamental structures of those platforms, thus also retaining their flaws. I think the reason mastodon is so boring (to me) is that, unless you already have people to follow, discovering interesting things can be difficult (this is the platform that has an aversion to text-search). At the same time, it doesn’t work as a series of interconnected small communities, because the format of the platform is not really amenable to that type of social interaction (I think?
Cohost and pillowfort are basically tumblr-clones. And while I do like them (as i dislike tumblr the least of the microblogging platforms), their eventual success would not be based on them revolutionising the internet.
Blueksy is the same, but for twitter. Imo it for various reasons seems to be a better attempt than mastodon, but it’s still the same thing, with the same faults (the nifty custom feeds feature won’t change that, I think).
My personal hope is that someone will come up with some alternatives that are both not person-oriented, and does not have the quick temporality. Maybe the problem is platforms trying to be everything at once; these companies want to replace the internet with their one website, whereas the best experience might be “going back” – in some sense – to more specialised sites/platforms. Maybe.