I remember, years ago, how everyone had their little space on the web carved out. We toyed around with things like the original MySpace, Xanga, and Tumblr. Sure, we had constraints, but we could make our little soapboxes have any background color, tickers scroll across the screen, and all the animated gifs we could find.
We had these spots pretty close to the way we wanted. They were free, and we didn’t care how this magic happened. All we knew was that we were making friends, adding them on AIM, and even meeting up in real life through tools that came along like Meetup. Shoot, I started a non-profit built on the backs of these free tools. And it worked until it didn’t.
I won’t do a deep dive into the hows and whys. I’d rather go out and shoot photos. I assume it had something to do with the eventual need to make an actual profit. But that’s unimportant because we lived through the stupidification of the internet.
The corps won. The everyman lost. What we thought were my spaces were their spaces. We all shifted to different locations on the web, and some of us quit altogether. All the great friends I made were now empty avatars on various social networks. I know more than a few people who rage quit and deleted accounts with thousands of friends, coming back a few months later and realizing that it’s nearly impossible to build back unless you play to the algorithm.
There’s a growing group that eschews the algorithm and puts words down in little spaces. Communing in spots like Micro.blog, social.lol, and a host of other hubs gathering people who are learning that everything old is new again.
I’m just a normal guy and I’m in and telling all my normal friends to hop off the social media treadmill. We may all be writing words that no one will see, but I doubt it. I believe more people will tell us about their day, post their favorite music, share movie recommendations, and type out thoughtful pieces that we’ll talk about wherever we determine our water cooler is these days. Let’s not let the corporate overlords steal it all back this time.