Misconnected

*DigiWho? DigiYou*

Once upon a time, I was a kid learning how to navigate the world and interact with others. One day, I heard friends talking about connecting at home through their computers.

I downloaded AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), picked my first username (Slickjoebrownjr), then sent my first message. Soon, I chatted with the OG AI SmarterChild, set away messages intended as direct messages, and communicated both with close friends and people I was too afraid to talk to in real life.

That simple connection changed everything.

The Rise

My hunger for digital social connections grew into MySpace, my first internet site. True Web 2.0, where we could contribute to what was on the internet, not just consume it. I spent hours designing my page, learned code to make it do what I wanted, and carefully pored over which friends would make my Top 8.

Cruising MySpace while AIMing friends, my social life was good.

But soon, MySpace fell to Facebook. I heard about this new social media taking over college campuses. As I was transitioning to college myself, moving from the U.S. Southwest to the East Coast, Facebook’s epicenter, some of my friends had already signed up. I enjoyed MySpace and AIM, so I joined Facebook too.

You know, to stay connected to friends.

And just like that, everyone had left MySpace for Facebook. What was better about it? It was where everyone was. You know, the social network.

Facebook was still the beginning. Twitter arrived, and I began tweeting to friends across campus. Then, I received daily insights from heroes and pioneers in diverse fields and soon received a chaos of information from the whole world.

Next, I downloaded Snapchat and talked to my friends through ephemeral messages. TikTok videos and dances flew past me. LinkedIn brought social to work. Many others arrived, and the line of social media blurred.

Main feed

In 2020, COVID-19 ordered us to be physically separate. This is social media’s time to shine, right? Social media keeps us connected, right?

But somewhere along the way, my friends stopped tweeting and stopped posting to Instagram. What we did share no longer connected us but became an obligation to like and share.

I did Zoom hangs, navigating the awkwardness of a group trying to have a natural conversation while popping on and off mute. Zoom happy hours quickly became a joke, people resented them.

When I needed to connect with people digitally, I was isolated, alone, in a cramped studio apartment.

I went on these social media platforms and scrolled through clickbait, ads, and scams. I felt more drained than when I opened them because this was junk food, and I wasn’t connecting with my friends at all.

So I paid the $8 for Twitter premium. I had been there for 15 years and wanted to support it. I wanted things to be better. I believed.

I paid $8, but then I could no longer change my profile picture or username without a review period. Don’t like the change? Wait two weeks.

I paid $8 so my posts would be amplified. My content will be shared with my audience! Instead, my views were lower than ever. Anything with my blog is deviewed and demonetized. What I want most to share with my audience is instead hidden from them.

Any content I share, I cannot take elsewhere. I’m still getting ads (!?), and they’re all scams. When I meet someone who wants to connect on Twitter, they cannot find my username even as I type it out for them. Back on my own, I cannot find anyone in search. People I interact with every day, 90% of their info put in, return random bot search results instead of them. I leave Twitter and go to Google to find Twitter accounts.

This is not social. This is media repackaged. This sucks.

Audible sigh. The deep breath out allows me to better process the visceral upset.

Social’s darkest hour

All of the social platforms have gotten worse, not better, over time. They have become algorithm-dominated and focused on capturing, hooking, and addicting our attention to sell ads.

But where else do we go?

Close Twitter, open Instagram. I open to the same user experience and product from 10 years ago. I scroll to a sponsored post, am served an ad I accidentally click on, and close the app enraged. Open Facebook. Mad I even thought Facebook would have something other than fake notifications and recycled memes. Ok, there is weird ecological animal memes Facebook group and a few relatives who make me laugh. Don’t care. Close it. Remind me to never open it again. How long until I forget?

Why do I come back? Because social media fills a need: We want to connect and communicate. That same thing I loved joining AIM. It’s where we share information and life with our network.

But social media companies have disincentivized sharing. How much sharing do you do on social media these days, and how do you feel about it when you do share? The platforms don’t care unless you share what the algorithm wants. The algorithm we don’t know, by the way. But we do know what it churns out – clickbait content that will keep you on the app and sell more ads.

Rather, we’re incentivized to consume – one more ad, one more dance, one more influencer #sponsored post.

What I really loved about Twitter was the individual contributions. Anyone and everyone could lend a voice to anyone and everything. This is citizen journalism. This is the empowerment of people.

However, social media companies focused on consuming all the value in their domain instead of leaving any for the people who power them.

Again, this is not social; this is media repackaged.

Please, please get me off this hamster wheel.

A problem half-solved

I told you above that I left MySpace for Facebook because that’s where the cool kids were. That’s my reason. The internet says people also left for Facebook’s streamlined approach, and MySpace became criticized for too many ads and for not innovating and serving its users but instead its advertisers.

This is the same business model every social media company has used since MySpace. No innovation, serving advertisers above users, sounds familiar?

This is because social media companies have been built to capture all the value that happens on their network. It does not matter that value is made by people, individuals like you and me. Social platforms built this way have no incentive to compete; rather, they operate as absolute rulers of their domain.

These companies get users to join via a different take on the same thing. Then, all the work you do, the attention you give, and anything you create or post ties you to and is captured by that platform.

We’re so back

But Farcaster is not run by a company; it’s a computer code protocol that companies can then build on top of. And because they’re building on top of the same code, the code that contains your data, they can’t take it from you.

Farcaster is a digital you. And DigiYou holds all your information, everything you create, all of you. then you get to choose how you want to interact with that data and how to best experience DigiYou.

And if a company tries to exploit DigiMe instead of serving me, I will leave them. We can easily change because we own DigiUs, and the next app and company start with the data we already made instead of from zero.

Imagine if, when you switch between social media apps, they all have access to your postings, musings, and creations across all of them. That’s how decentralized social media works. It takes the value that companies have hogged all for themselves and redistributes that value back to the network participants. So, companies have to create value alongside users!

There is one problem: the joy I felt first chatting digitally with my friends. I can’t spend all my time on Farcaster yet because I need you.

So I come back to bring you along.

Come join us on Farcaster.

Then we can all delete the old socials together and never have to redownload them again 🙂

Social media is a problem we know we need to solve. And now we have the tools to do it. Traditional social media will continue to get worse. This new social media? Competition causes improvement over time.

Do you know how all the kids these days want to be influencers? Well, soon, we may all receive the value from our influence.

But for me, it’s the connection. I joined because I was ready to leave the isolation of traditional social behind and reconnect with my social network.

Originally published on June 28, 2024 at Paragraph