Internet Protocol space is a curious place.
There are millions of websites hosted on the internet. Perplexingly, only a vanishingly small percentage of the cumulative time that humans spend on their electronic devices is spent on the open web (off-platform). Why?
Individual, independent content has lost its shine. If you can’t serve your content to millions of people, scaling to the entire population of the world, the thought process goes, why bother writing it? If posting on your own website costs money and effort, but a Twitter account is free, it feels silly to spend money acquiring a domain and setting up a site.
There’s also a cost to posting your own content outside of a particular subcultural niche. Your writing style, your authorial voice, may disappear from your control; it may be fed into an autoregressive text prediction engine by someone who will then profit from your writing. Do you want someone else to be able to ask ChatGPT or an unrestricted alternative to write “an argument for [XYZ], with this pile of blog entries as reference for the writing style of Your Name Here?”
But, that’s not why you came here. You asked me where people spend their time and why. Here’s the early 2020s platform guide as requested.
Instagram
If you want to view and post pictures from your phone, it’s hard to go wrong with Instagram. It’ll be a blast, as long as you ignore these minor bugs: invasive ads and tracking, manipulated imagery, abusive direct messages, pig butchering scams, oh, and catching myopia.
Reddit
Are you a fan of a particular company, genre of music, artist, hobby, stock, or anything that has a name or number in the English alphabet? There’s probably an active forum on Reddit for any one or all of your interests. And yes — they’ve each probably developed their own sub- and meta-culture, social strata, and set of humor.
You can spend months building your own pseudonym and persona in one of these subreddits. You can integrate with the culture and contribute funny comments and posts. You could even host a Party Thread or play games programming the AutoModerator. You may make some friends. You’re likely to learn how to quickly respond to almost any text message by virtue of exposure. Eventually, you may realize that users of this website prefer to stay on it – forever.
One other thing: Reddit is a flat namespace. On the same website where you chat about SpaceX’s next rocket booster, or read someone’s weekend creative writing project, you’re never more than a few clicks away from actual graphic content that is promoted by users for entertainment. Are you comfortable contributing something serious when the “suggested next post” contains a sequence of words that would make your great-aunt faint?
Twitter / X
Do you have a fanbase or are you part of a fanbase? Trick question. Every user on Twitter is playing the same game, whether they have 220 million followers or only 3. They are there to send and receive hearts and read funny letters. The follower count is the only metric that matters. It is a promise for the possibility of future hearts. Nothing keeps someone addicted like hope.
Nobody’s day is short enough that they don’t have time to tweet. Even the billionaire who values their time at $800,000 a minute believes it’s worthwhile.
YouTube
It’s just television, personalized. Are some videos art? Are others news? Are any tripe? Yes.
Specialty forums
These names may ring a bell: vBulletin, SMF, Fora, Discourse. They’re the infrastructure behind the forums that followed Google Groups and Usenet but preceded forum aggregators like Reddit and Facebook Groups.
Some of these fora have high-quality discussions, but all of them have at least one poor-quality discussion section. It can be helpful to segment these forums into three categories:
– Short-to-medium length conversations that will reach a natural conclusion
– Long running threads which have a coherent topic & respectful discussion
– Long running threads that have gone off the rails
Maintaining all three of these populations without alienating the high-powered posters (positive and negative contributors alike) is a critical skill for a forum moderator interested in ensuring their advertising revenue stays stable.
Summary
Large platforms and forums are hyper-focused on extracting your time. They have shareholders to please and hosting providers to pay. Users there are just as addicted as you. Keep in mind that their bandwidth is limited.
Small platforms tend to allow their users more freedom. SimpleMachines forums don’t pass your comments through a “abuse / spam detector” filter, pre-hiding your comments the way Facebook and Twitter do, unless the forum operator explicitly turns on that function. In this sense, they’re more like email.
Did I miss any forums you want to hear about? Let me know at “I left them out for a reason (at) paulhansel.com.”
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