“We just want a social network we can use”

Do we?

This is a really interesting article about the decline of Bluesky, but I think the bit I’ve quoted maybe gets at the central issue I’ve personally been grappling with for a while. There’s a casual assumption that ‘we’ want a social network, and I’m not sure that’s true these days — certainly it’s not where my brain is at.

Even if we set aside the mismanagement/enshittification of the legacy platforms, what is the actual point of social media, now that a) we’ve observed that large scale communities trend towards chaos, b) we’re increasingly recognising the associated addiction problems and c) the novelty of the 2010s has worn off?

A social platform that exists purely to be…social feels like a product of its time: an experiment that was new and intriguing for a while but is a thing of the past. It’s an awkward ice-breaker at a conference that never ends.

The elephant in the room is that I’m posting this on Substack Notes, which is, of course…social media.

Thing is, I enjoy Substack Notes only because it is tied to the long-form writing on Substack. If it were just a standalone social platform, I wouldn’t use it. Notes is a way into long-form writing: Notes itself is not the main draw. Notes wants me to find that long-form writing, and that is its purpose. Notes is irrelevant without the rest of Substack.

Threads, Bluesky, X…I’m not sure of their purpose, especially given that they generally want me to stay on them and not go clicking external links. If they’re not a gateway to something, then they’re nothing. They’re just performative noise. Dead end narcissism and artificial character limits.

The exception being, of course, if you’re a professional journalist. Because than the social platforms can seem to function as gateways to the latest news. They’re perceived as the intravenous drip, the pulse of the planet, even though they’re less representative of society now than they ever were. I suspect this is why journalists and politicians seem to still be tied to Twitter, when it ceased to be culturally relevant many years ago.

My only encounter with X now is when a politician or famous person’s tweet is quoted elsewhere. I never see the original tweet: I just see it rather awkwardly referenced by the BBC or the Guardian, because the news is put together by people who are institutionally unable to quit legacy social media.

Might just be me, though.