The digital ship is sinking, where is my lifeboat?

Meta’s “Twitter-killer” app, Threads, reached 100 million users in its first five days. Under a month later, there are talks about whether the app has already failed. Valid reasons: its exclusion from the European Union because of privacy and data protection reasons; its complete disregard for accessibility. A few, also discussed reasons: it is very difficult to migrate an entire community, and the reason why Twitter is still around is because its very active users have years of social capital that we can’t get out of there. Also, people have their aunts and colleagues on Instagram and Facebook; nobody wants their aunts and colleagues on their Twitter second coming. But then, what we might not be talking about so much: app fatigue. We just don’t want to have to rebuild all of this (*gestures around frantically*) all over again.

In November of 2022, American academic and game designer Ian Bogost wrote an article for The Atlantic that started with “It’s over (..) It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon”. Arguments like this have been made since at least 2006 (famously, John Dvorak wrote a 2006 article for PCMag that said that “the golden age of the internet” was coming to a close because, mainly, of content filtering). But by 2020 we seemed to be still living in a sort of golden age of social media, if we accept the fact that social media has lived through several ages and the “gold” wasn’t for everyone at every turn. 

As Ellis Hamburger, from Snapchat, wrote in a think piece for The Verge, social media apps start from an initial promise of a place to connect and share, and then they become something else as their efforts to monetize and their need for unfettered growth turns the platform into a product, and into an unrecognizable one, at that. The feed now shows you ads you’re not interested in, people you don’t follow and you would never want to, and the entire experience seems to be designed to frustrate us and ignite our anger. 

Now, in that article, Hamburger says “I am here for the Japanese frog videos I see on TikTok. But in no way do I see them as a replacement for keeping up with friends and family — the goal of social media to begin with.”, which seems to me like he’s missing a key point from how people actually used to use social media: as a place to build a community, not as keeping up with their friends from high school, but to find a place where you can become friends with people like you. This is why weirdos ruled the internet for the past decade, and this is how I personally built a career helped by the so-called “golden age” of social media –I found my tribe.

The blurry line between communicating and broadcasting, as Hamburger puts it, is indeed a byproduct of parasocial interactions, which is a cornerstone of social media –not a bug, but a feature. Today’s Twitter just wouldn’t exist if there weren’t an entire contingent of people absolutely convinced that they are entitled to argue with you, the stranger at the other end of the internet connection, and if they weren’t adamant about fighting you no matter what. That xkcd comic where the character just couldn’t go to bed because “someone is wrong on the internet” is everyday life for everyone who is Very Online™. For us, an internet platform’s death is something we might have experienced many times (we went through MySpace, Google+, Vine, gosh, we were there to see Geocities die) but none of these platforms has outlasted Twitter, and therefore the impact that it has to be left stranded from its death is much greater. 

And there, the main reason why app (or platform) fatigue is such a burden: to make one of these initiatives start, there is a need to build trust within the community. Threads did not achieve that and it isn’t easy to think it will at any point. Twitter did, and then it became a hellhole of harassment and misinformation, and then it was bought by the closest thing in existence to Dr. Evil and is being quickly turned into Virtucon Industries. Of course, the broken trust that once existed on Twitter cannot be rebuilt, but for those of us whose communities still survive there, there is intrinsic trust within our specific sub-community that is very difficult to replicate elsewhere, and we remain there while enduring constant harassment because of that sub-community. 

There is, thus, an illusion of choice on whether people with less privilege to be connected in other ways stay in any specific platform: not everyone can afford the cost of having to rebuild their social capital, for many of us (activists working with poorly connected communities; freelancers who rely on their audiences for work, etc.) it is in fact a matter of life-and-death, and there is no point in virtue-signaling about not being somewhere because it is owned by evil, if that is where our community is. This will last until it becomes unbearable by the everchanging characteristics of the platform, and that threshold of unbearability is different for every user, but the fact that we are still there, and not over on Threads, proves that the main single asset of a social media platform is the most difficult one: people have to be there when you log in, or else there is no point in opening the app to begin with.