image by Mike Licht on flickr, CC BY 2.0
Facebook and Xwitter are dying. Their membership is shrinking, their usage is dropping, and satisfaction with them is at an all-time low. Copycat “social media” have arisen, but they lack the huge user base to replace the wreckage of today’s greedy oligopolies with something better, and their owners seem as devoid of imagination as the tech bros they’re trying to supplant.
To understand the enshittified wreckage of today’s “social media”, I think it might be helpful to think of it in metaphorical terms. To that end, let me start with a question:
What useful functionality have these ‘media’ tried (very badly) to replace? Primarily, I think, two things:
- the means (“platforms”) by which we connect with and share news and thoughts with people we care about (formerly done by the telephone, by mail, and by in-person visits on our front porches and at pubs and cafés; and
- the repositories (public and private) in which we maintain and store our knowledge and ideas, and the sources on which they are based (formerly done with our personal journals and home libraries, and visits to public libraries, newsstands and bookstores).
Why has it been successful in replacing these means and these repositories?
- with “social media” we can connect and share easily with a vastly larger audience of people, including people we don’t know; that can broaden our networks and expose us to the opportunities (perhaps fame or fortune) those broader networks offer;
- the “traditional” media have overwhelmingly revealed themselves to be outrageously dishonest, biased, and corrupt; and
- we have simple access to a vastly larger number of repositories of knowledge and ideas.
Why have these “social media” turned out, then, to be so unsatisfactory?
- we are constrained by crappily designed “platforms” that do not let us connect and share easily (or at all) with people the way we naturally and intuitively want to;
- the oligopolies that control these media censor what and with whom we can connect and share with, and their “algorithms” force us to navigate oceans of spam advertising and other misinformation while “deplatforming”, banning, and obstructing access to people and information we actually want to see and interact with; and
- increasingly, almost all of the repositories we might be interested in are paywalled, as more and more users desperately beg for money to pay the broligarchs’ rent for space on their platforms.
My metaphor for the means and platforms we use is the train system. My metaphor for the repositories we use is the “public” library.
Imagine you have a new privately-owned train system in your city. It offers you high-speed access to far more places and people than you ever imagined possible. But the processes for using the new system are byzantine: You have to buy a “membership”, and it only provides access for certain people to certain stations. Many of the stations feature pay-walls that require you to pay a gatekeeper to get in or out. The train windows are covered with billboards so you can’t see what’s outside unless you pay a premium to have them temporarily removed. Many trains reroute you to places you don’t want to go, because the monopolistic owners of the stations in those places have bribed the train system owners to redirect you. And of course, the new system has zero interoperability with the existing local public system.
Now imagine you have a new privately-owned library network in your city. It offers instant and complete access to almost everything published in the world. It offers to immediately “publish” everything its “members” write. But unlike the “old” library, you have to pay a variable and unregulated “rent” for everything you read, and it won’t let you read anything that existing publishers won’t let the new network have for free. It censors anything that the monopolistic owners of the new network decide they don’t like, or which these owners have been bribed to block. The library is plastered with posters for stuff that have paid the owners to promote them, and it’s hard to find the stuff you’re looking for when ads for stuff you don’t want keep interrupting your search. And of course, the new network has zero interoperability with the existing local public network.
The notable thing about these metaphors is that they both describe the overhyped offerings of unfathomably rich private monopolists trying to replace (and in the process destroy, as ‘competitors’) established public utilities.
Private corporations are not your friends. The ones in the communication and information “spaces” make profits by replacing and destroying public assets that were created for the benefit of all citizens.
I started writing this blog 23 years ago, as an experiment because blogs (part of the first wave of social media) were being hyped as possibly transforming the way by which people (including corporations) would henceforth share information. When I started, my blog quickly became one of the 10 most-read Canadian blogs. That was nice, of course, but it wasn’t why I was writing. My blog was, and is, my personal journal, my diary of thoughts, my searchable “auxiliary memory”. I have never monetized it in any way, though it has benefitted me immensely (my last two employers and my publisher both ‘found’ me through my blog), something that would no longer be possible as blogs have been buried in the firehose of enshittified low-quality “social media” content.
When Salon e-magazine abandoned its bloggers in 2010, I moved the blog to WordPress (with enormous help from my brother), where it’s been ever since. My blog simply replaces the modest processes and content I was already using. I never had pretences of riding it to fame or fortune. It does not, and was never designed to, replace either the means by which I connect to other people I care about, or the repositories of knowledge and ideas (my own and others’) that I value. So although I initially signed up with both Facebook and Twitter (I just used them to link to my blog posts) I never found either platform to be at all valuable, so as they became enshittified it was dead easy for me to abandon them.
The collapse of both these horrific platforms is now well underway, and for billions of people, they have become the default and exclusive means and repositories they now heavily rely upon for communication and information. So extracting themselves from these platforms, as much as most users now want an exit ramp from them, is going to be very, very difficult for them. They’re involuntarily addicted because all their contacts and much of their own information and “histories” are on them, and there’s no way to move all that stuff elsewhere.
And that brings me to Substack. Like WordPress, Substack is essentially a blogging platform, but unlike WordPress it has an automatic newsletter publishing function added in. It’s been enormously successful as one of the few “social media” to avoid corporatist enshittification (at least so far). It’s free to publish on it, though if you choose to have subscribers (for money), Substack takes 10% of your subscriber/membership fee.
So why are media experts claiming it’s the next Xwitter or Facebook? Some say it offers a more controllable, thoughtful space for idea-sharing and (ugh I hate this term) “content creation”. Some say it avoids the anti-social influence of ubiquitous ads and information overload. Some say it avoids the toxic culture that now permeates Xwitter and Facebook. Some say it’s already become the “thinking person’s” social medium. And some say that now that everyone (including the MSM) is begging for money, at least Substack offers some value for the money they cadge from you.
I acknowledge that Substack certainly has appeal to those looking for an easy way to replace or migrate their information-sharing and thought-capturing processes and repositories to a useful public space. It’s simpler (but less flexible) than WordPress. It’s easy for “publishers” to embed podcasts, livestreams, discussion threads, and videos and other media in their posts.
But what has everyone excited is that Substack’s private (but VC-backed) owners are now trying to expand Substack into a Xwitter/Facebook type medium through what they call Notes. You don’t have to produce any “content” to be a Substack member. And when you are, you can join or subscribe to or follow all its published content (some free, some paywalled), participate in conversation threads about it, and ‘message’ its authors. This gives it much of the functionality of Xwitter/Facebook, though mostly with the same awkward and unintuitive mechanisms and interfaces (I’ve forgotten when I last saw any real innovation in social media). But thus far it is not enshittified with ads, censorship, paid-for misinformation, and the other crap that has destroyed what little usefulness Xwitter/Facebook once offered.
But…
This new appeal is also introducing to Substack many of the dangers that have destroyed its predecessors. Substack now has recommendation engines and ‘discovery’ features to help members find other members publishing on topics of mutual interest. For now these appear to be uncorrupted and not purchasable by promoters, but will the owners be able to resist the temptation to make money from ‘subtler’ forms of promotion than bald ads?
And its ease-of-use and opportunity for monetization (just through paid memberships, for now) is attracting corporations as a means to promote brands, and also drawing (ugh, another loathsome term) “influencers” and other marketing intermediaries, and educators. There is a huge danger that these new “publishers” could quickly overwhelm Substack with the same dreck and slop that now dominates older “social media”, especially when they start to employ AI to flood the platform with oceans of fake “content”. And Substack, with its ambitions to become the next leader in “social media”, is actively courting these types of “publishers” who are in it primarily for the promise of wealth and fame.
And when you use Substack, you trade ease-of-use for control. Your content sits on their site, not yours, subject to whatever the vagaries of its owners and the market might dictate.
And Substack already has a lot of harsh critics, especially for its app, which I have never used or seen. (As someone who wants to support the Open Web, I loathe and refuse to use proprietary apps in general.) And Anil Dash, whom I respect, is a fierce opponent of the platform.
I am strongly tempted to use my Substack “membership” as a vehicle to simply republish or link to my existing WordPress blog content, much as I did in the early days with Xwitter/Facebook. But once burned, twice shy, and I think I will want some assurances before I embrace it: Since Substack is a private corporation and hence subject to profit and IPO temptations, it might soon become just another enshittified garbage dump for spam and slop.
I’d be much happier if it were a non-profit public utility with a charter designed to keep it that way. Remember those, public utilities? You know, organizations owned by the citizens at large, whose mandate is to provide optimal essential public services to all at minimal price?
Those were the good old days, I guess.
