All about social networks

One of the things I talk about in the last chapter is this idea of a social network that’s actually a utility, where you go to it to do the thing you wanted to do and then you leave. It’s just sort of there for you to use, like a landline. Certainly, it’s nowhere close to a landline, but having the News Feed Eradicator does take out that

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Message boards and internet communities have existed since the start of the internet, but they’re becoming increasingly sophisticated. They now have the ability to raise funds, share decision making, and legally incorporate themselves. These internet-first organizations have already proven to be extremely influential online and off, and this will o... See more

A thousand-plus years ago our ancestors's need for safety and context sparked the rise of cities, guilds, and universities. Our current needs as internet-liberated individuals are sparking a similar burst of organizational experiments, including the maturation of Reddit boards, Discord channels, WhatsApp and Telegram groups, and newer and repurpose... See more

One thing… I have this ongoing group chat with my friends on Facebook Messenger and something we talk about on and off is how it feels very impersonal like in Facebook Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp, all of these, they all look more or less the same for every group. That has its uses because it means that you have a standardized interface and like e... See more

@Austen people will pay a lot of money for parasocial relationships bundled with entertainment (applies to a lot more than just porn)

Balanced, neither extracting too much from its component organisms nor pretending that a pantomime of a return to a pristine and ungoverned state will solve any problems at all. (Predation is inevitable in any system, but a working ecosystem starves out the ones who overfeed and provides cover for growth and for the long, continuous experiment of e... See more

Global mega-platforms under capitalism are structurally incapable of handling the business of civilization: of governance, of providing genuinely public infrastructure, of making knife-edge decisions about the balance of liberties and securities. It’s not what they do or what they want to do, and in many cases it’s in opposition to their actual int... See more

Few, if any, of this moment’s apparently unstoppable tech platforms will survive for long. The people on them will eventually leave—when they’re forced to do so by the continuous degradation of their experience, or because they’re forced to do so because their governments put the hammer down, as Brazil recently demonstrated—or sometimes when they j... See more