salvaging social media's corpse
I know a some creators of other online services, spaces, communities etc. read my blog, so I hope the following isn't stepping too hard on anyone's toes, but I feel like talking about it. In general, I appreciate you trying, giving your time, searching for ways to accommodate people who want to leave big social media without missing many of its features.
But: Not developing any “solution” or “alternative” to social media is freeing to me, as I feel like I can question the use, motivation and design choices of social media without any of my products being complicit or coming across as hypocritical. I fear sometimes that creators of new alternative platforms don’t allow themselves to fully follow the criticism of social media and its features to its logical conclusion, because it would inadvertently also criticize theirs, and interfere with their motivation to be the next, better thing instead and profit off of the gap that is left.
Some will agree that this or that aspect of social media is bad and be critical of the big platforms, but then hesitate to actually look at what exactly makes it bad and contributes to the undesirable aspects, refusing to see some of the cycles in the back that foster the enshittification of both the culture and platform itself that affect their alternative space as well - questions around scaling, design and profitability, mostly. Existing in our system of infinite growth. Instead, they seem to think that a particular aspect of social media is only bad because it’s in the wrong hands that made greedy decisions, or because it is centralized; almost none of the dark patterns are recognized and removed in their own version of it.
This denial makes sense, but it also makes the criticism and resistance feel a little hollow to me at times. It’s easy to assume they’re only critical because they want the strongest competitor to fall to be the next person that profits off of the supposed need for social media. Maybe that should be discussed more, even if it's a little uncomfortable.
I don’t mean to insinuate they’re doing this like a supervillain, but instead maybe naivety and possibly even arrogance about how much better their platform (that is copying a lot of things less critically than it maybe should) will be doing. To me, it makes sense that they have to hold on to that hope, because the alternative would be to give up on a (potentially) commercially successful entrepreneurial project and feeling like someone else will do it anyway, so it might as well be them - someone they think is good and who will do it just right and avoid the missteps of the ones before. That, plus the questionable view (possibly emboldened by their own addiction to certain platform features) that people need this or that.
To be clear, I don't think a platform that lets you follow people, or has a feed, or has an ability to upvote something is automatically bad! But if it's a whole intricate web of a lot more than these few features together that operates the same way as the big social media apps is where I personally draw the line.
That is what our disagreement comes down to: While I could do away with most aspects of social media combined as it currently is and see it as a failed experiment, you still believe it can be done ethically and salvage anything you can from the corpse. You think it's dying because of bad management, I think it is dying because it wasn't supporting what we want to see in the world and needs to be heavily re-imagined.
While I think certain household features people expect nowadays don’t actually serve them and harm them instead, you seek to implement them to build a viable alternative that will attract users, hopefully paying ones1. I wish you were a bit more opinionated in withholding some dark pattern features and rethinking design choices, but you want to make the switch as effortless as possible and keep things the same (which I also understand). I see these dark patterns as unethical no matter who employs them, you don’t.
Fair enough. I don’t know who is right; maybe you’ll pleasantly surprise me and I’ll eat my words. Maybe I’ll change my mind down the line. I absolutely understand the tension between building a what is considered a good product, and the same things that make it 'good' also being an entry-way for manipulation and addiction. My approach may be naive as well, as it would be trying to re-train users' brains to be okay without certain bells and whistles of a platform.
Still, I think it’s not good to do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different behavior when all the design staples to remind us of our horrible time on the other platform are still there. I wonder what incentive the brain has to change if it’s always the same pathways being strengthened for hours every day for years and you just change who owns the shop. I don’t expect users to act or feel differently if everything is still as usual and looks basically exactly like the place where they had these awful and even traumatic experiences.
It is a weak improvement to me that instead of obsessively checking Musk's app now, they might be obsessively checking yours instead. I don't consider it an improvement at all when the thing that encourages antisocial behavior, surface level communication, blatancy, fake news and doomscrolling is now open source instead of closed source.
Why do you think you’ll have enough paying users to not have to resort to ads and user data selling after a certain size? Even if you wanted to do away with them, how do you avoid addictive and manipulative design elements when you want and need user retention to get paid? How do you handle the effect the numbers have on the voices, tone and posting habits and avoid negative engagement farming? How will you handle large scale content moderation? How do you handle scaling in general - will you simply deny people at some point? Can you afford to? How is your stance on taking investor money and do you think you will be able to keep that up?2
I will definitely watch with great interest as many projects will navigate the same waters the big companies have been in. If they manage to pull it off in a way that agrees with them, great. Even better if it turns out in a way that proves me wrong. I’m just not ready to buy into it like that.
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Published 23 Aug, 2025
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