I was in school when the world was supposed to end. We all gathered at the classroom window and looked toward the north, in the direction of the Yellowstone Supervolcano, waiting for the predicted eruption. But 2012 came and went without a bang or a whimper.
Despite the absence of world-ending catastrophes in my youth (there are a startling number of failed doomsday predictions floating around), a small and illogical part of me still hoped for disaster. Something that would shake up society, forcing everyone to start from scratch again. Maybe it was all the popular books and movies floating around in my head — José Saramago’s “Blindness,” Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” David Fincher’s “Fight Club.” I didn’t wish for death or pain for anyone, just a global mulligan.
Writer John Koenig invented a word for this feeling: lachesism, which he called “the desire to be struck by disaster — to survive a plane crash, to lose everything in a fire, to plunge over a waterfall — which would put a kink in the smooth arc of your life.” Eschatology is tied to one of our oldest beliefs, the idea that human progress can get out of hand and require divine intervention to destroy and renew.
Years later, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke and #DeleteFacebook seemed to promise the collapse of that social media platform, lachesism flooded my soul. I didn’t think about my need to keep in touch with old friends or to buy tchotchkes from my neighbors on Facebook Marketplace. Deep inside I was rooting for Facebook’s collapse.
When Elon Musk completed the purchase of Twitter, the fourth biggest website in the world with 8 billion monthly visits, I had the same reaction. I felt certain the world would be better off without this platform. It was too big and held too much power, and it would be spectacular to watch it collapse. Many others felt the same way, and Musk’s theatrics unleashed a diluvian wave of negative news coverage, with members of the media barely able to disguise their glee at Twitter’s impending doom. Myself and others were cited in The New Yorker, making the case for dropping the platform.
In less than a month, 50 of the top 100 advertisers pulled out of Twitter. Employees were sent packing. Webpage features started breaking. A mass exodus of users began the search for a new promised land not subject to the changing moods of billionaires. Millions, it seemed, were wishing for the apocalypse, but I had to take a step back.
How bad are these platforms, really? Do they deserve catastrophe? There are myriad reasons why one may dislike these “virtual town squares.” Studies suggest the sites reward negativity, spread misinformation and take up an obscene amount of our time.
It doesn’t require an expert to know that people can be mean online. Without face-to-face feedback, there are no real emotional repercussions to misbehaving anonymously. And meanness is only part of the problem. Interactions are stilted so that “threads” of conversation become an endless stream of widely reposted (and often negative) one-liners about current happenings, instead of genuine engagement. Everyone is able to have the last word.
But these platforms also give me the chance to DM the writer of an especially profound essay on niche audio equipment. They remember birthdays for me so I never have to. They warn us of danger and help organize protests. Without social media, I wouldn’t have known that I can silence my microwave by holding down the “2” button.
But the founders of these platforms not only invented new ways of communicating with others, they invented a whole new genre of relationship — a sometimes shadowy imitation of genuine human connection that leaves one aching for a pre-internet age. To say they are a mixed bag is a vast understatement, but these platforms have become indispensable for many, including myself.
The question is no longer whether or not to be on a social networking site — it is which site to use. Each has its own flavor, personality, strengths and drawbacks. In an effort to leave Twitter, I joined multiple alternatives to get a sense of where I might plant my new digital flag.
One of the biggest differentiating features between platforms is governance — what speech is allowed, and by whom. Users have looked to the moderators of these sites to make them safer, more positive and more trustworthy.
Unfortunately, tech companies have struggled to live up to the task, quickly finding that their criteria for content moderation is at times highly subjective, or influenced by the advertisers that pay the bills. (These sites are free because the users are the real product.) These problems prompted Facebook to create its own Supreme Court and to begin thinking of itself more like a government and less like a corporation.
Each site approaches these challenges differently. I tried Aether, a small, ad-free platform that mimics the communities found on Reddit with the feeds of Twitter. Its biggest selling points are that the content disappears after a certain amount of time and the communities elect their own leadership. It is reminiscent of the forum era of the internet. Posts ask questions like “What are the popular darknet sites to visit?” or “How common of a problem is glue-huffing?” and share news articles about Twitter. From what I have seen, the platform does not have many active users.
Post is in its beta version, and its waitlist is a mile long (350k when I got in line). It has a system of “Post Points” you can use “to expand paywalled posts and reward your favorite creator content. This makes the platform more like Twitch, just with a Twitter-style feed. At this point, it is mostly just journalists posting articles and complaining about Twitter.
CounterSocial was started by a hacktivist known as “The Jester.” According to the website, it’s “the first Social Network Platform to take a zero-tolerance stance to hostile nations, bot accounts, trolls and disinformation networks.” CounterSocial has the perfect interface for an air traffic controller, with multiple streams of content, a network sentiment meter and constant news banners of your choice scrolling across the page. It has nostalgic photos of Texas, people looking to trade Pokémon and users complaining about Twitter.
Mastodon is an archipelago of user-operated servers that are connected. You may choose your own server, and each has its own method of verification and moderation. Major news platforms, celebrities and companies have jumped on it as the most likely replacement for Twitter. After getting over the confusing hurdle of words like “federated” and “decentralized,” this platform presents you with a Twitter-like feed, where users post thoughts about news, daily life and, of course, the (mis)management of Twitter.
Other platforms like Parler — boasting an active user base of 40,000 — address issues of free speech, while former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social and former Trump aide Jason Miller’s Gettr offer outposts for conservative users looking to escape the politically motivated content moderation of some popular sites.
The governance of these platforms is important, don’t get me wrong. Everyone, but especially those that rely on social media for income, should have clear posting guidelines and due process if they are violated. Ideally, platforms should not be flooded with ads, algorithms should optimize for conversation over virality, and users should be verified for safer interactions.
But the biggest issue by far stems from us, the users. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously described hell as a state in which “we judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves.”
What place heaps more judgment on us than social media? We go there to be validated and criticized by strangers with little relevant information about us. A valid question we should be asking ourselves: is subjecting ourselves to this worthwhile? Could the trillions of gigabytes of user-generated effort go toward something more valuable than a glorified internet forum?
If you feel these sites are worth your time, and I believe they have that potential, the culture has to change with the technology.
We interact with each other daily, and when we contribute to hostile, hateful environments, we are punished with more unhappiness and anxiety in our real lives. If we do not learn to treat our online neighbors with the same (or better) social guidelines as we do people in our real lives, meaningful change cannot occur. Like in the real world, we cannot expect a billion people to be well-behaved, so we must carve out localized communities of people who actually make life better for us. These sites can no longer be tools to broadcast our voice as far as possible, in the interest of self-promotion.
No matter what social media platform we use, whether it’s Twitter, Mastodon, Post, CounterSocial or Club Penguin, we will always have to face each other. It’s the thing that makes this technology so powerful and useful, but also so dangerous. Top-down policing of these sites can only do so much, and moderation is a last line of defense.
Whether or not Twitter’s death is nigh, its current pandemonium allows us to question and reframe what we want from social media. There are improvements being made, and we have the chance to rebuild with the knowledge of what has gone wrong. But these lessons need to take root as a part of an evolving digital culture. Our platforms need to change, but we need to change with them.