Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

this post ... discusses the history of social networks getting bought out

She mentions many vanished or withered social networks. The three examples that she focuses on are Prodigy, LiveJournal, and Twitter, though she also mentions many others. Prodigy was a pre-Internet dialup service, where she first saw the clash between community and profit. LiveJournal is a blogging service that was bought by a Russian company. And Twitter was the "microblogging" town square of the world, now under new management and future unknown. 

Regarding the relationship between community and profit... Her theme is that community keeps springing up online, only to be destroyed by ignorant profiteering. Maybe that does happen. But let's also consider some other factors. First, it's actually expensive to operate and administer a social network. Second, the users are constantly at risk of migrating on to new territories. Third, communities have internal, purely social dynamics too, that affects their viability. 

Ideally, someone would fact-check her narrative by asking to what extent these other factors were also at work in the rise and fall of the networks she names. For example, are Friendster and Myspace ghost towns because the executives mismanaged them, or is it simply that most of the users migrated to Facebook? 

I would like to mention two other virtual communities. One is The WELL. This is an Internet community almost as old as Prodigy, that's still running because it remained based in an actual community of Bay Area techno-intellectuals, rather than wanting to be everything to everyone. Thirty years is a long time for an Internet community to survive, it might be worth studying. 

The other is the far more obscure Quillette Circle. Quillette started out a few years ago as part of the "intellectual dark web", the vague alliance of a few conservative and classical-liberal thinkers against the rise of progressive "cancel culture". Quillette posts essays and then allows comments. A few years back, they tried adding a full-fledged forum. But by then, it was the Trump years and you now had conservative populism and the alt-right in the mix too. The forum began to be dominated by unwanted opinions from the right, like "anti-vaxers" and "election deniers". Eventually they were driven away by heavy-handed moderation, but after that the forum was a ghost of its old self, and was finally shut down entirely. 

I mention this because it touches on a different aspect of her narrative, Internet community being affected by politics. In the case of LiveJournal, the claim is that agents of the Russian state bought it because Russian opposition was using it, and then also wrecked it for e.g. western LGBT users by imposing conservative Russian rules on content. Maybe this is what eventually happened. The purchase of LiveJournal happened just before the Medvedev interlude, and several years before Putin's return as president and the increasingly conservative turn in Russian society; I remember thinking of it mostly as Russia keeping up with Internet culture by buying a readymade western network rather than developing one of its own. I think Russian-language LiveJournal is still quite lively... Also, the purchase happened just as Tumblr opened up. Again, I would want to check her account of events. Did English-language LiveJournal die off because of Russian policies, or because the users were attracted by Tumblr, or was there are interplay between the two? 

Finally we have the ongoing saga of Twitter, which includes both the economic and the political/cultural themes. I remember being astonished that Musk would want to take on the thankless responsibility of overseeing one of the biggest social networks; at the time, I theorized [LW(p) · GW(p)] that maybe the core agenda was to keep corporate tax rates down by defeating the Democrats in the mid-term elections... But, he did always have that "X.com" idea for an "everything app" (and the Chinese Internet now offers real-life examples of this), and maybe he's actually earnest in his fears that threats to free speech ("woke mind virus", Covid-phobia) will cause civilizational stagnation. 

Valente seems to have two complaints about the new Twitter regime. One is economic, that it will "take away the livelihoods of millions of people". The other is cultural and political, that it will "welcome monsters" and "turn against" a long list of things (Ukraine, vaccines, Jews, LGBT, welfare programs, liberal democracy). 

On the economic side, Musk actually talks about making it possible for Twitter content creators to make money, although for now we don't know what that means. When Valente says all these ordinary people will lose their livelihood, I can only think she means that they or their audiences will leave Twitter because it has become inhospitable or intolerable. And this seems to hinge on everything in the second complaint. Social interactions in the old Twitter were curated according to particular cultural and political agendas, in addition to the bare legal minimum of restricting scams, libel, etc. Musk retained that legal minimum but stripped away the higher curatorial apparatus. Some new system of standards and practices is going to replace it, but perhaps it will be a "liberaltarian" one rather than a "progressive" one. 

So, you weren’t certain about the appropriateness of posting this here, and I agree that it’s not in the usual style of current LW content, but I think the message is important (and the tone requires a little detachment to read), and is something for any tight (online) community to be mindful of. Personally I found it to be a very good read, so thank you for bringing it to my attention! 

I would normally delete a post downvoted below zero; this one is relatively important [edit: in review, I think I mean is on a relatively important topic, though it could be improved upon], so I'll leave it. though if it gets downvoted more, I will in fact delete it. comments about why it's downvote-worthy/delete-worthy would be appreciated, if you'd like me to delete it.