new internet

🚨This is the trap that social media, and by extension all of us, are in:

📈Toxicity drives use. Lowering toxicity drops ad sales (if you are ad supported) & engagement (even if you are not)

📉Toxicity spreads like a disease. It turns regular users toxic & makes networks awful

But you know what? I really like the physical world. I like to feel like

a healthy animal. Too much time in the virtual world makes me feel worse.

I don't like it. And to me there is no question that the qualities of

the physical place where I live are far, far more important than anything

about the Internet, and always will be.

Perhaps someday the human race will be ready to become one collective consciousness. But the experiment of the 2010s shows that this day is not today. Let the internet once more be an escape — a place where you can find your people and be happy. Let us learn to speak a thousand different languages once again. Let the Tower of Babel fall.

I think we see a decline in the big "open sea" social networks, replaced increasingly by fragmented silos. I don't know what will happen to Twitter, but if Elon's shenanigans cause it to fail I don't think we'll ever see anything quite like it take its place:

Also, much like a small homestead on a hundred acres, websites were closed ecosystems and isolated. There were no social networks or marketplace platforms to tap as a firehose channel for building an audience, and there was no real mechanism for ‘going viral’.

You had to grow your traffic the old fashioned way – by asking your digital neighbors for... See more