July has brought with it some rather unpleasant changes in the social media hegemony. The protests against Reddit have been about as successful in traditional terms as Lord Buckethead’s runs in general elections. Most decent third party Reddit clients are dead and all users have to show for it are quiet news items confirming that Reddit traffic is exactly what it was before this whole mess started.
And then there’s twitter. Dear, sweet, old Twitter. Elon and the new friend he’s bought along to play with his toy have decided that they want to limit engagement with the platform, even if you are registered with it.
But honestly, is spending less time on Twitter a bad thing? Or rent-seeking CEOs displaying their hand for that matter? In a world consistently reminding us of the horrors brought by social media, shouldn’t we embrace forcing people to use less of it?
It’s not like this is going to end the way people use the internet these days, it’ll just split them between any number of competing online services. I can think of worse fates than disrupting the hegemony of dopamine-spewing hellsites ruling the roost at any given time. Sure, some people will just up and pay for Twitter Blue, but most will just go…where?
Because from this side of the fence, what it seems like is a bunch of users doing what users do best and just using the platform. The stats speak for themselves. Reddit’s traffic immediately went back to normal, leaving everyone who was sure that a blackout protest would work feeling just a tiny little bit embarrassed. And as far as twitter is concerned, if everyone who said that was going to leave actually left, we wouldn’t continue living in this most weird of universes where a routine phrase on all news media is [$PERSON_OF_INTEREST] just posted the following on their twitter account.
Let the people who are passionate about whatever it is that they are passionate about move on to Discord servers and the occasional forum. Everyone else, the kind who are not especially bothered with what’s going on with their platforms can stick around for the inevitable descent into mediocrity and irrelevance. You know, like Facebook.
For a business to make money without all of this complaining, it should provide additional value. Most social media platforms, on account of their “users” being the product (a fact that surprisingly continues to elude a great many amount of people) don’t do this. Well, not unless you are a marketing firm with a captive audience and don’t want to bother with all that…content generation…malarkey. It’s much more sporting to let the product do it itself. With this in mind, no wonder that any attempt at making users to pay for the privilege of being advertised to strikes the more interested users as an attempt to destroy the platform.
For that, they could just ban porn, it worked to speed up Tumblr’s decline and delete it from most of the collective consciousness.
