I’ve found myself using the phrase “hypermedia” a couple of times and I want to explore it. To me, it’s about publishing information – tweeting, even – in a way that’s enmeshed and interweaved with other people’s work. Hypermedia already exists, it’s just unevenly distributed. I’m looking to accelerate it.
Social media isn’t nearly as social as it could be. It’s mostly variants of pub/sub protocols – you can publish stuff (tweet, post photos on instagram, facebook status updates and so on), and you can subscribe to other people’s feeds. Beyond that, my sense is that the primary concern of social media platforms – and this is understandable – is maximizing ad revenue.
How do you maximize ad revenue if you’re a social media platform? Loosely, you want people to be using the platforms as much as possible. You don’t actually need everyone to be publishing – you need some subset of people to be publishing, and then you want as many people as you can to be scrolling through their feeds as much as possible.
One way or another, it seems that social media platforms end up being optimized for outrage. There are a bunch of reasons for that, but I don’t really feel like getting into it right now – I’m sure you can connect the dots yourself. And this isn’t a new thing, either – see xkcd 1227.
What would it look like if social media were optimized for making friends? I don’t expect to be able to change the way social media platforms work, but as someone who’s always been interested in making friends, I think it’s an interesting question to ask. The cool thing about social media platforms is that you don’t actually have to do what everybody else is doing. You don’t have to be a passive consumer of information. You don’t have to quote-tweet and share things that piss you off. You can actually take the time and trouble to talk about things that you personally care about, to nerd out about your interests, to find other people who are interested in the same things, and to actively build relationships with them.
In my ideal world, social media would be something that encourages that process of making friends. It would maybe prompt you to articulate what you like, what you’re interested in, and connect you with other people with similar interests. There are some platforms that have some version of that (I vaguely recall some sort of book/movie/song recommendation site, but it’s not very popular). But for the most part, Twitter (for eg) won’t really tell you who you ought to be talking to. As I see it, self-motivated connector types are currently doing a lot of the heavy lifting that could perhaps actually be baked straight into the platforms.
I’m currently mostly a Twitter power user. I’ve used lots of other platforms in the past. I was big on Quora in the earlier days, but I found myself using it less and less as the quality dropped. I used to be a big Reddit user, and I still check in on it from time to time, but I think over time I got kinda bored by how… on the larger subreddits, it’s difficult to build meaningful relationships with anybody. And the few small subreddits that I enjoyed (my local /r/singapore, for instance) seemed to get populated with low-effort, low-quality posters, and the conversations started to bore me.
Somehow, Twitter has managed to allow for interesting people to have interesting conversations with one another. (“Why?” is a good question to ask for another day.) I’m good at doing this, I have always been obsessed about doing this. And one of my life goals, I think, is to help people appreciate and understand how I do it, so that those who want to do it as well can do it too. I am a fan of Margaret Mead’s quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” I’d like to be in the business of helping small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens find each other, build coalitions, start businesses, whatever it is that they want to do. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that these people are often disconnected. They don’t even know who the others are, or how to find them.
I still think sometimes that there was something quite magical about the early blogosphere. You could write long, thoughtful posts about things that you cared about, people could find you, you could link each other, you’d get interesting comments. I’m sure it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but there was something about the fundamental dynamic that I find desirable. One of the cool things about Twitter is that the character limit forces “containerization” – ie you roughly end up with one thought per tweet, and so people can engage with other people’s thoughts at the level of individual thoughts. Instead of quoting someone’s entire blogpost, you’re compelled to quote-tweet the specific tweets that resonate most with you. I believe that this has a positive effect on public discourse. There are surely some costs too – some thoughts may not fit nicely in a few tweets – but on the whole, I’ve found Twitter to allow me to make friends better and faster than the blogosphere did before it. So I’m proud of that. And I’m a little worried, to be honest, because I don’t know if this is actually a priority for Twitter, and it’s fairly likely that they might accidentally kill the golden goose in pursuit of their goals, whatever those goals are.
So I do think it’s important for each individual (not ALL individuals – just those who are interested in playing this game that I’m playing) to have their own home on the web that isn’t beholden to some platform. Each person should have their own website or blog that they control, that can’t get easily locked or deleted by some third party. Each person should build their social graph on something that isn’t entirely dependent on Twitter or Facebook. I have a Patreon and a Tinyletter and a YouTube – all of these are really just ways of putting my eggs in more baskets, so that losing one account (eg my Twitter) won’t entirely erase all the work that I’ve done to build my body of work, my relationships, my reputation.
tbc