You Can (Not) Go Back

Like many people, I departed Twitter after Musk purchased the company, since it seemed like as good a time as any to make a break with the service. The user experience predictably tanking shortly after also helped. Despite many predictions of its impending demise, it’s still chugging along thanks to the twin forces of habit and comfort with mediocrity. It’s persistence, and the emergence of alternatives that each seem to capture some essence of the original Twitter–but not the whole of it–also reveals how different online communication is these days and perhaps why it might be in the early stages of transformation.

When people speak wistfully about the early years of the internet and web, they focus on the means of communication–Message Boards, IRC, AIM/ICQ—but what they actually miss is the nature of that communication. The way people engage with the internet now is focused on just that—engagement. It’s a means of shouting into the void in the hopes of eliciting reactions that may lead to fame (or infamy), greater self-promotion, and/or financial rewards. Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and other social media are designed around the one speaking to the many. In fact, social media isn’t the best description for it. I’d call it promotional media.

The old internet was organized around actual communication and while strong personalities would occasionally emerge, the very nature of it was the exchange of ideas, which all sounds very high-minded. In reality, it was basically a bunch of people chatting and arguing with each other. The profit motive didn’t exist and combined with the design of the available tools, the one-to-many approach found in social media just didn’t exist in a world that favored the one-of-many discussion format.

Just look at the very designs of newsgroups, message boards, and chat rooms themselves. It’s all fairly egalitarian. In the case of forums and newsgroups, there’s the initial convo starter which looks no different than any of the replies, and then box after box (or indented threads in the case of newsgroups) that all look alike. It’s a collaborative approach where every idea is presented on an equal footing with any other. In the the case of IRC and other chat rooms, this principle is even more stark–a person is just a line of text amongst dozens or sometimes hundreds of others visible for a few seconds in the infinite scroll (like particularly active Twitch chats today).

Forums and similar places would always have certain members attain a level of notoriety and status on their boards. A well-trafficked board would eventually see the eloquent, the delightfully odd, or those who consistently posted the best turns of phrase attain a measure of popularity with the members. But their fame would be limited to just that board, and a popular poster certainly wasn’t going to convert their reach into a branding opportunity to move product.

It wasn’t until blogs came around that a lot of those posters began to move on from being just one of many into singular voices talking to many. Many of the early bloggers that I remember had either been forum or newsgroup posters who’d risen to prominence among their own communities, or had converted from sending out newsletters to the blogging format. In any event, blogs were a transitional medium to social media, but they were important in how they began the paradigm shift from collaborative communication to creator-centered content.

The arrival of social media only supercharged that transition by removing a lot of barriers to entry, where posting was as easy as picking up your phone and typing into a little box to post, and Twitter was the place where a lot of folks with great jokes on forums went over to as the platform matured. dril is one of the best examples. He was just one of many clever people on the Something Awful boards, but then he moved to Twitter, became famous and leveraged that fame into a book deal.

It’s almost as if for all the talk about how things used to be better on an internet dominated by chat rooms and message boards, when the opportunity came for people to jump into a creator-centered promotional world, they didn’t hesitate or look back. I think it’s because at the end of the day, we don’t just want to be one of many voices in the mix. We want to be heard. And we want the potential to make money at it if we can.

You can make the argument that social media is exactly that–an endless churn of voices, each seeking to rise above the rest just like in the old forum days. But none of those people are talking to each other, they’re just posting takes and hoping to get noticed for a time before returning to the churn. Imagine a forum thread where someone posts a topic and all of the responses are jokes or hot takes, and instead of being limited to just one thread, it’s every single topic. And the software moves the most popular responses to the top. It would be the worst discussion forum in the world. Or Twitter.

So a lot of this talk about recapturing the feel of the early web would have to necessitate jettisoning the current social media model, which at its heart is a promotional tool and not a collaborative one that builds communities. I don’t begrudge anyone who uses it to make money; on the contrary, these platforms exist to enrich billionaires and shareholders at the expense of our privacy, so if you can grab a few relative crumbs from that pie, then go get that bag.

But if you want to return to some semblance of the way things used to be, you have to surrender a lot of what people like about the contemporary internet. We like memes. We love hot takes. We apparently like to post screenshots of social media sites and post them to other social media sites. But most of all, we like to make content and have other people react to it, rather than have conversations with others.

It’s literally what I’m doing right now.

As far as where things are headed, I really don’t have any idea. Everything seems to be a top-down approach these days, with billionaires and VCs attempting to dictate the next big thing to the rest of us, rather than allowing anything to organically emerge. I sometimes think you’d have to build an entirely different internet that wasn’t funded by today’s oligarchs, but also wasn’t immediately converted into a criminal enterprise or put to nefarious use by various nation-state hacking groups, to really do something new. But you can’t build another internet, especially one that was like the first. That emerged from a set of circumstances over time that cannot be repeated, and I believe that any attempt to create something new would be immediately squelched by the oligarchs, the state, or maybe just lack of interest.

The Fediverse is a good solution with its decentralized structure that focuses more on open protocols rather than the walled-garden model of contemporary social media, but we’re already seeing people complain that the lack of centralized control also means that moderation is half-hazard or non-existent. Also, most of the services using the fediverse model are just mimicking existing social media apps, and I think a lot of people coming into them feel as if they’re getting a degraded version of what they were used to.

Discord is the one popular tool that may be a sign of what’s to come. It’s an interesting hybrid. It’s design and format hearkens back to the OG internet, but it also has the taint of centralized capitalist control that can arbitrarily change rules, shut down anything it doesn’t like, or enact any number of whims because it controls the storage and bandwidth.

And that’s really the crux of the whole matter. With the fediverse or any other similar approach, storage and bandwidth costs are the key bottlenecks to expansion and growth, and why the oligopoly and VC-backed services control the current landscape and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Newsgroups were text-based and distributed across servers, so bandwidth and storage costs weren’t prohibitively high. Forums were often ran from a server in someone’s house or as part of a shared storage plan that the owners of the sites had to pay for out of pocket or by starting ads & paid membership tiers, but none of them were getting filthy rich off the endeavors.

When these new social media services emerged, each flush with VC cash and the hopes of eventual payout from an IPO or a corporate buyout, they took the burden of those storage and bandwidth costs onto themselves and allowed everyone to use their services for free. And the devil’s bargain was that by allowing them to bear those costs, we surrendered our privacy, our freedom of creative expression, and ultimately the health and vibrancy of the entire internet so they could make a lot of money and we could waste a lot of time, while a relative few won the lottery and made a living using those platforms.

The only real way to recapture any of the dynamism and magic of that old internet would be to seize the costs of storage and bandwidth for ourselves, but that’s a Herculean task in this current landscape. The internet is no longer a text-based medium. There’s pictures, gifs, audio, and video, all of which exact a heavy toll on any independent operator. You’d have to stay small, stay niche, and rely on the goodwill of the people using your service to pay for the costs of operating it. It’s a big ask in a world where it feels like everyone has their hand out asking for a monthly subscription, and widespread popularity would only make things worse to the point that the options would be to shut it down or allow the serpent into the garden and sell out.

Until a means to distribute bandwidth and storage costs among all the users of a service becomes widely available, redundant, and secure, I think the effort to break free from the current model is likely a pipe dream.

I don’t know.

Maybe the only winning move is to not play.