Musk’s thus far hilariously bungled takeover of Twitter makes for amusing schadenfreude but has also reignited discussions around how online communities ‘should’ work.
Something I’ve realised is that I’m not really interested in a ‘new Twitter’ or an ‘alternative to Twitter’. An exodus to Mastodon doesn’t really appeal. I think that’s because the era of mass, global social networks feels increasingly like a relic of the 2000s/2010s. My focus has shifted - unconsciously, and without me realising until now - to smaller, deeper interactions online. Discord, WhatsApp and, of course, Substack.
As a writer in particular, Substack is where I’ve made my home (at least for now). There’s an amazing creative community to learn from, a growing readership and a wonderul set of tools.
It feels in some ways like a return to the Usenet forums of the 1990s in tone and quality of discourse, but with more interesting technology underpinning it all.
Fewer people, better conversations.
What do you think? Where do you go to find community online these days?
I don’t think the Human Species was built to maintain more than a few dozen strong social connections and the weak ones are obviously a corruptible poison. I’m voting for micro-communities based on mutual passion (art, sports, etc.) and a lot more silence.
Ah. The Dunbar Number argument. It does have merit, but speaking for me personally I still want the opportunity to encounter new people or ideas that I wouldn't otherwise see. Not saying Twitter represents the ideal implementation of that, but I have discovered a lot of thoughtful people there. Yes, there are still some people like that on Twitter even though it seems otherwise.
Yeah, I've got a lot of value out of Twitter over the years. Discovered interesting things and interesting people, though I don't think I've ever developed actual meaningful relationships. But as a way to follow and discover the thoughts of interesting people, it's great.
That's part of why I'm enjoying Substack - it's enabled me to find fascinating people and have an arguably more rewarding interaction, whether in reading longer material or via comments.
That said, the rapidity of the networking and the ability to find interesting things on Twitter has yet to be matched. It's the source of most of Twitter's problems AND most of its value, so it's a thorny problem.
I'm not sure that Twitter was ever about community. It was more a bazaar than a community. You may have had your little area where you shopped regularly but it was still full of random encounters and strange passions. A community, on the other hand, is something formed as a place to feel comfortable and at ease with familiar people. A community turns down the noise of the world; a bazaar turns it up.
Facebook has something of the same effect, though to a lesser extent. Its algorithms too are designed to turn up the noise. Substack, on the other hand, is more about turning the noise down.
But the corollary of this is that if you want to sell ads, you would rather create a bazaar than a community. Communities tend to dislike adds. A bazaar is all about rival hawkers trying to shout each other down. The problem, with which so many services are experimenting, is how to make money running a community rather than a bazaar.
In the end, if it is not ad-supported, then it is going to be some form of user pay. Substack has its own particular model of paid subscriptions, on which I am currently freeloading because I haven't turned on paid subscriptions for my newsletter, nor have I paid to subscribe to anyone else's.
Musk may be looking at this transition from bazaar to community with his $8 verified user plan. After all, platforms that depend on advertising are captive to the agenda of their advertisers. That has become more and more blatant and partisan in recent years, and it may be that we are entering a phase in the development of the web in which people are realizing that if they want community without the noise and the intrusive agenda of the bazaar, they will have to pay for it.
The era of "people won't pay for content" may be coming to an end. That may be no bad thing.
I subscribe to Ben Thompson's Stratechery newsletter. He believes that twitter is in a unique position because the service will never be replicated. Yeah, you have the knock-offs and the clones that are out there, but you'll never get the mix of different beliefs and ideas that exists there today. In addition to that, since it's text based there is a limit to how much it can grow simply because video will always be more popular. That limit will stop other companies from trying to create a competing app because they want more revenue. For all of these reasons combined, Thompson believes that it might be possible to make everyone who uses Twitter subscribe, but it would need to be at a low price. Like three dollars a month. He also says that there's an equal chance that a move like that might kill the company, but it seems like things are headed that way already.
And there is something about Discord that turns me off. Like too many things everywhere. It feels very masculine and I hear other women also echo this sentiment.
I use it in a very specific manner. While I'm in theory on several 'larger' servers, I generally ignore them all - they're just background noise with notifications turned off. Occasionally useful for information, but generally too busy to be useful.
Where I use it on a regular basis is to connect with small, specific groups - in much the same way as WhatsApp, I suppose, but in a more flexible interface that works better across devices.
That's exactly how I use Discord. I belong to a few large servers, but they are all muted. They're just there in case I need them for something. The servers I actually use are small and exclusive to people I know I get along with.
I want to get started with Discord, but it can get overwhelming. The only I'm on is the Obsidian one, which is fun cos I'm a nerd. I do like Slack communities too - I belong to Write the Docs and they are lovely folks there.
I think you need to find the right community - passion + right discord = great! So far, the only one I've been able to stick to was one about Obsidian, but I barely interact there.
That's an interesting observation. It's the first time I've seen someone describe Discord as being masculine. I've never thought of it that way.
I'm in a small Discord of writers. There are only 4 members. That's the only one I actively participate in on a regular basis. The large ones are just too much.
I only use this term because I’ve only heard women complain about it and there is something very Reddit-y about it, and Reddit type spaces feel more masculine to me, but using this very loosely to mean that I think Discords appeal more to men than women.
I'm a gal and I love my reddit groups. But then again, I tend to hang in forums that are "bland" - tech writing forums, personal finance ... it's quite lovely there. I avoid the crazy places but sometimes can't help but look lol
I’ve been involved with the Web since 1994 and it has been my experience that small sites work best to build community, and by small I mean sufficient, engaged participants to establish critical mass but not so many as to destroy intimacy.
They are hard to find.
Twitter was a ‘community’ until it chose to embrace algorithms. Communication was difficult by severe limitations of post length.
Mastodon has been a community, but we’ll see how much the Twitter-fleers change the intimacy and tone.
Substack is an awkward community given the way it is set up -- for an individual not groups.
As to FB & IG ... firehoses and little individual control.
I don't really see 'Substack' as a community. It's more that individual writers I follow on Substack each over their own little micro-community. That they are using Substack is incidental and largely irrelevant (other than it being nice). So there's the interesting discussions on a couple of popular science newsletters, or there's Elle Griffin's entrepreneur-writer community, and so on. Each their own micro-community, which is why they work, IMO.
And that's what I like about it. What little community I find on Substack, I feel heard and not ignored by the din. And I get to read/listen to voices that are generally shut out from algorithms because they "don't meet guidelines" - I'm talking about the quiet musings, the unconventional thoughts of ordinary people, not influencers or people with klout. Love it.
Substack also enables disagreement and debate without it instantly descending into madness. In particular Elle posted something that I (and some others) disagreed with, but the ensuing discussion (at least as far as I saw) was civil and interesting and a useful contribution. That simply wouldn't have happened on, say, Twitter or Reddit.
I agree with you about small sites and about the moment that Twitter started to go down hill.
I realize everyone jokes about it, but Google+ really was the best place for community. It was large enough to provide opportunities for you to find a decent-sized group of people who shared your interests, but still small enough so that you could actively participate and help shape the culture. Unfortunately, it was too small for Google so they killed it.
Substack as an awkward community is a great way to describe this place. I get that Substack really isn't trying to build a social network, but they keep adding social network features so the comparisons are bound to happen.
I'm really not sure what I think about their approach. There are things they could do that would make the site work better, but those same things would push it more into the social network model. One big thing that could improve the site is some type of public newsfeed. Of course, that also introduces the very thing that could one day kill the site because newsfeeds inevitably lead to algorithmically generated visibility controls.
The inbox reader on the web (or in the app) is doing the job for me of a 'newsfeed' - though, of course, it's of newsletters I've specifically selected to read. But that's what I want: I never had interest in the 'public' Twitter feed (that's a glimpse into madness): I just wanted to see tweets from people I follow. Same with Instagram. As those platforms moved away from that towards algorithmic "how about this!?" approaches, I became less interested.
Give me the option to network and go down rabbit holes, but don't force it upon me. All social networks have moved in the wrong direction for me.
As for Google+ - I never quite got into it. Thinking back, it was perhaps ahead of its time, in that it managed to meld 'big, wide, global' with 'small, intimate, deep' in quite a clever way. People weren't ready for it, though: it was all about the mass networking and instant fix of Facebook and Twitter back then.
I understand your points about newsfeeds and largely agree with them. I just want some way of finding more rabbit holes to explore when I stumble across something of interest. The existing setup does offer that-- to a degree-- because it allows me to go see the publications you've decided to list on your profile that you read, ones you recommend, and to check out the profiles of people who have commented here.
I think if Substack spent more time improving categories and search results (which to their credit are vastly improved over what they used to be) then I wouldn't feel the need for the serendipitous discovery that a public newsfeed can offer.
T Van Santana, I used Openspace/Openbook and then later Okuna. I stuck with them through the Okuna rebranding. Last I heard they were struggling financially and not having luck at getting more funding. Do you know if they are still online?
They are not—at least not as Okuna. Joel started a new network called Somus, but I really don't know anything about it beyond the name and that they were recruiting celebrity users.
This is something I have been thinking about recently. In a pre-Twitter world (from what I can remember lol), I would maybe hear about a blog or website and add it to my Google Reader (RIP) feed. And then would rely on those blogs to learn about other blogs worth following. But it was a much slower and much random-er process. As I tried to read every entry from each blog I followed, I was hesitant to add new ones.
That all got supercharged with Twitter, where you could follow a lot more people and not feel like you had to read every tweet from someone (although I certainly tried). And from the people I followed, I learned about podcasts and Facebook groups and Discords that I could join.
Facebook groups and Discord servers are great for forming a community, but the downside is the network effects needed to make those communities worthwhile. I'm in a number of Discord servers where it is basically the same unifying principle and it would really be better if there was only one server. So I find myself not really participating. Twitter doesn't have that problem because everyone is on it and you can interact with everyone.
I do think that Substack encourages community-building around the particular publication and I'm more likely to comment and interact where the writers are fostering discussion and responding to comments, like you are Simon. I'm excited to test out the Chats feature on my own newsletter once it's rolled out to Android and web.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how the new chat feature affects things. A lot of Substacks have "join my Discord!" as a perk, which has never interested me much - it's too separate and 'over there', and it'd just make Discord even noisier. I'm very curious to see how it works within Substack.
I like that the chat function is attached to the publication. I don't want to/need to set-up an entire Discord server and channels just so I can chat with my subscribers.
I do wonder how much busier this place will be when the Chat feature is rolled out to Android. I know several Android users who are eagerly waiting for the feature to be added to their app.
Yes, will be interesting to see. I also think that having the Chat feature on web will be very important. I wonder if the Chat will be more real-time or more like the post comments.
As it is now, it's basically the same threaded comments you see on posts. It has a dedicated tab in the app. When you click on that tab, you'll see a list of all of the publications to which you subscribe who are using chat. Click on one of the publications and you'll see any post they've made. Click on the post to read it and see comments or to reply.
I really hope they never enable real-time chat. I like to respond to comments in my own time rather than having to try to get everyone on the same schedule so we can all talk.
The way Substack works currently also encourages a certain level of intellectual rigour - varying depending on the subject matter, writer style etc of course - which is only really possible with longer-form posts and responses. Just take this thread, for example: every response here is nuanced and considered, and the discussion is all the richer for it.
It encourages writing rather than shouting.
'Faster' chat could mess that up quite considerably.
As I have written recently I've left Twitter and I am still working out community. I have a limited presence on most other sites but I am trying out Mastodon and some Discords. And there's the Substack community itself. I still have hopes for a true global network but it seems like it could be an unsolvable problem.
I like the idea of what Jack Dorsey seems to be trying to achieve with BlueSky. As I understand it, it's a protocol that would allow services like Mastodon to remain decentralized, but more easily interact with disparate servers.
I think web culture has changed too. I'm like you in that I want the convenience of a centralized network, but I think what we're seeing is the increasing bifurcation between social media and private chat. You have things like Facebook and Twitter where you post things that may or may not be seen by your friends because of the algorithms, but then you also have things like private Discords or WhatsApp where you can send messages to a small group of friends who will see your message. Private chat has grown, I think, because everyone has started to realize how unreliable posting to the established social networks is.
Absolutely, John. And I think a lot of people thought of Facebook in particular as a form of 'private chat'. You'd post stuff and your friends/family would see it, and vice versa, but in a more relaxed way than having a dedicated 'chat room'. As Meta forced in ads, then increasing amounts of algorithmic bilge, it diluted that early promise to the point where it no longer exists. At which point Facebook has no purpose - and, as you point out, people have started going elsewhere to find those close family/friend connections.
The ad-driven model simply doesn't supported a properly curated experience, which is incompatible with a good social experience. Substack works for me because it's got 3 levels of curation: my own, that of other writers (ie recommendations and so on) and Substack's (search and light touch discovery on the 'Discover' page). But it's all driven by my selections and my curation - and they can do that because their model is built around writers getting paid.
Ad-driven works slightly better, I'd say, for purely entertainment platforms - the likes of YouTube and TikTok. Those are less about community and more about being entertained, for which an algorithmic approach works slightly better. Slightly.
Exactly. The other day I was reading an article and someone said, "If I was running late and I needed my wife to pick up the kids from school, I wouldn't post that on Facebook because there's no guarantee if or when she would ever see it. I'd send it to her in a private message where delivery was guaranteed."
I quit Twitter a few months ago so I don’t know what is happening there. I never really liked it. I liked Facebook in 2008 when it was just my friends and I having funny conversations. But when the share button appeared and allowed people to use other people’s content, it started going downhill. And when it became a soapbox for political ranting I was done with it.
I agree with small is better for community. The larger a Discord gets, the harder it is to follow and the more it feels like social media. I find the best community in my Substack comments right now. I haven’t activated the chat feature yet. It is a little one-sided since only the newsletter owner (or contributors) can start a conversation. And I don’t really want another daily chore of thinking up a chat question.
I used to get a great creative writer community feeling on Medium, but that died a few years ago with the Partner Program change.
Outside of writing, I have built a community of both followers and fellow musicians with my acoustic trio on TikTok. There is a community of people who follow a specific group of musicians and attend their livestreams. Through that community (and livestream interaction), I have gotten to know the other musicians. We even coordinate our livestream schedules and promote each other. Since the start of the year my band has gone from 0 to 44k followers.
Twitter is, at least, still Twitter. Largely the same original product, for better or worse. The odd thing about all the Meta-owned products is that they started off well, and then were slowly transformed into far worse products. They're really a collective warning about allowing algorithms to dictate content.
I've seen posts from writers and artists begging people not to leave Twitter because that's how they promote their work, network and make more business contacts. I feel for them, but it's also a valuable lesson on why we writers cannot depend on "rented land" to do our business. Which is why I've always prioritised setting up and building content on my website and maintaining a mailing list.
That said, I couldn't take my eyes off the Twitter drama. I don't like Musk in general. I think he's a narcissist, not a genius like everyone says he is because he's great at one thing: Buying innovations and touting it as his own. Granted, he is a good businessman. A ruthless one - and I suppose that's why people love him. He makes the hard decisions and don't care how it looks on him. But imagine having that kind of person running one of the world's most powerful media outlets? Frightening. In my country, where "cybertroopers" are deployed during election time to smear the opposition online, Twitter will be a playground.
I've been following how my favourite authors - most of them heavy Twitter users - are reacting. I think everyone's knows Stephen King's infamous conversation with Elon Musk. Some have decided to leave completely. It's sad, because I think Twitter needs dissenting voices. If it truly is becoming a "hellhole" we need some angels to balance things out.
I'm staying on Twitter, however. I have a very carefully cultivated feed. I only interact with good, fun people. I've met interesting people this way. And I generally enjoy the chatter on my feed. But sometimes my tweeps get frustrated and start ranting and that attracts trolls and ... yeah, it's unavoidable to pissed off at least once a day on Twitter! lol
I do engage with folks not of my world view - as long as they are nice and balanced and willing to hold civil discourse. Unfortunately ... that doesn't seem to happen much these days!
Yep, it's why the advice has always been to build a mailing list. It's an asset you properly own, and you can shift it from place to place if needed. That's another great thing about Substack - at the moment it's the best thing for me to use, but I'm also secure in the knowledge I can migrate elsewhere if I need to, without losing anything.
(that said, they're adding more and more features at the moment which would make moving away increasingly painful)
Many of these features aren't that great, though. Feels gimmicky. The actual improvements to functionality of the core parts of publishing are good, but everything else is a distraction. I'm meeting a lot of people because of them, though! People are pissed 😂
Interestingly, I’ve discovered more writer people over on Twitter since Friday than I have in any 48 hour period since I signed up over 2 years ago. Then, yesterday, horse Twitter took off running in the wake of the Breeders Cup and the retirement of several prominent stallions to stud.
I’m on Twitter, still, but my curation is starting to look more like it did on Facebook during 2016–one strike and you’re blocked. I’ve expanded it to aggressive Mastodon-explaining techies who can’t seem to take “it doesn’t work for me” as a response. They possess an evangelical fervor akin to crypto bros or people who think Open/Libre Office is wonderful and everyone should use it. Generally, oddly enough, they’re also low-follower, recent accounts.
I’ve added Counter Social to my list. Once someone stops DDOSing it, it should be a great place. It used to be part of Mastodon but it’s its own thing now. Lots of eclectic interests and…I’ve met even more writers! It doesn’t seem to be a site for aggressive promotion but subtle seems to work as well.
Replacing Twitter professionally is going to be hard simply because of the degree of networking that happens there. I’ve landed several interviews and learned about publishing opportunities that don’t get duplicated elsewhere.
Discord—I may create my own whatever-you-call-it there, but for now, I’m part of several writing Discords—including SFWA, Substack, Kindle Vella Writers, a couple I learned about through Twitter—and several science fiction convention Discords focused on virtual convention running.
Other than that, I’m going to try to get more long-form posting such as Substack going. Now that I’ve had cataract surgery, a lot of this stuff seems to be easier to think about. But I have to ramp up because I realized I’ve seriously ramped down as a response to a fast-moving cataract.
Another wonderful positive of Substack is that communities often form around podcasts, but in the past, podcast hosts had to use other platforms to host their community chats. Now Substack allows podcasters to keep everyone in one place on one app.
Yes! That's something I really want to delve into at some point. I produced a podcast for several years called The Writing Life, which has a good listenership but there was no real feedback loop to speak of. Substack would definitely have helped with that.
it great as writers we have choice my trouble is sticking to one. I have not long started substack but I really like using it and I find more people open my emails I am slowly shifting my newsletter subscribers over I never did like twitter however
I never left Ello. And they're finally getting around to rebuilding it, so that's nice. But those of us who stayed, have had a nice lowkey community of writers, artists, and musicians for about seven or eight years now. It's super chill.
It had 15 minutes of fame in 2015 or so as the "Facebook Killer"--which was a ridiculous idea, that people would abandon FB over their name policy. Sure, people were mad, but they weren't gonna leave for good over it. Then, whenever that tumblr mature content policy change happened, a lot of folks from tumblr came over. But mostly it's the same faces from the old days who stick around. We do get a few new folks every now and then that hang out for awhile. Look me up if you ever wander that way and I'll introduce you: https://ello.co/tvansantana
I can't really think of anything online I would dub a "community," other than spaces delegated to specific topics - i.e. "The VFX Community," or "The Doctor Who Community," and those are directed discussion rooms. This applies to Reddit, Discord, or the FXhome/ActionVFX forums, either "Chan," et.al. Pretty much everything has self-sectioned into small topics and illustrates the nigh-unavoidable truism that when you lock enough "like minded" people into a shared space they will either ossify, close ranks and gatekeep, or tear themselves apart with petty internal struggle. I've withdrawn from all Reddit and Discord groups/servers I was in and only keep the accounts so no one else can create accounts with my email addresses (which did happen on two platforms and took awhile to sort out)
Whatsapp is basically encrypted SMS/MMS messaging. It requires your phone number, allows you to send texts, voice, photo and short video clips, and the only reason I'm on it is because no Irish phone providers handle MMS anymore - but it's literally the same functionality given by standard cell phone service in the USA. Except "encrypted." Which means diddly/(squat^2) given how many Whatsapp threads have been entered into evidence to things like the J6 committee.
Facebook and Twitter are relatively unique in that they really are soapboxes to allow one to spew whatever they wish into the digital ether for all and sundry to see. Facebook, of course, allows Groups and/or filtering your posts to only be seen by your mutual contacts - or subsets of your mutual contacts (aka "Friends" and "Close Friends"). Their potential community aspects have more or less been overriden by algorithmic filtering and abuse of such by bad actors. Still, I will maintain my accounts there - again, solely to prevent others from creating accounts using my emails.
Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Vimeo, et.al. are NOT "social media communities," they are shared gallery apps that may or may not allow comments. In most cases, except one, which will come up below), I maintain my accounts solely to keep my emails locked up. I'm sensing a theme, here.
Dunno. Closest I can think of to online communities are the old Yahoo Messenger rooms. Perhaps I'm biased, for there I'd met people who have been friends - actual friends - for decades.
The aforementioned FXhome forum had a community feel for quite a while, and may be the only other online place where I've met people I would consider "friends" - Hi, Simon! - but, sadly, that place changed for the worse about 14 months ago and has become negative, bordering on toxic.
I have few other insights and no true solutions or suggestions. I am slowly withdrawing from the online spaces I used to frequent (I'm even transferring my Hitfilm University YouTube channel over to Film Sensei Jay Haynes to allow him to continue maintaining the ever growing Playlists of tutorials - and Simon, you've known me long enough and well enough to understand that is highly significant withdrawal...as well as the exception to maintaining an account to lock up the associated email address. The email address in this case can be closed) , and am trying to consolidate those people who I actually care about away from being spread across multiple sites. This likely means returning to direct messaging via Whatsapp or similar client or returning to good old email.
The two best online communities I've known were forum-based. A Usenet group in the 90s, alt.babylon5.uk, was a wonderful place - again, centred around a specific interest, but actually just a bunch of people who got along. And then the 2000s-era fxhome community (which not coincidentally spawned a LOT of talented filmmakers).
The key thing about usenet and old school forums is that they encouraged longer posts, slower responses and deeper thinking - all things which I'm finding recreated here on Substack, albeit in a different context (here it's all about individual writers).
I find it encouraging that there's a seeming shift back towards more considered online debate.
Loving the Substack community. I was never a big Twitter user, but find myself using it more and more lately because IG and FB have gotten so bad and full of bots and ads and people impersonating my account. A year ago I would have said IG was my biggest community, but I’m super annoyed with that platform also since reels.
I’m excited about Elon’s Twitter takeover because I think he’s a brilliant visionary genius and I LOVE my Tesla 3, so I’m curious how things will turn out.
IMO Teslas are at least 5x better than any regular car so to me there is no compelling reason to think Twitter won’t improve over time.
I think Musk has been good for tech, because he has money and some big ideas which he's enabled cleverer people to go execute. Hence SpaceX and Tesla, both of which are pretty amazing.
I used to think he was a visionary genius, but over the years I've changed my view on him - I think he's a very rich man with a couple of really interesting big ideas and a lot of really, really, really bad ideas and bad takes on how people and the world work.
I also think he's wildly unsuited to a societal/community challenge. He approaches everything as if it's a tech issue, and the last decade has fairly definitively shown that isn't the case. In fact, a Silicon Valley, tech-bro approach to society seems to lead to disaster.
For me, him calling a British rescuer of the Thai cave kids a 'pedo' was the tipping point when I had to admit that Musk is, in fact, quite an unpleasant and rather odd person.
Eew have not heard about that cave pedo thing. He does have ASD1... so... def gonna have different way of thinking. Did you watch his recent full discussion with Ron Barron? I watched the whole thing last night and it restored my hope. I found it very inspiring.
I haven't seen that, no. If he kept to tech challenges and opportunities I think it'd be fine. That's where he's had cool idea and has helped fund genuinely exciting stuff. The way Tesla has forced the electric vehicle market forward is vital stuff. He's just really, really bad at most other things - especially when he wades into social or political issues.
I don’t think the Human Species was built to maintain more than a few dozen strong social connections and the weak ones are obviously a corruptible poison. I’m voting for micro-communities based on mutual passion (art, sports, etc.) and a lot more silence.
Ah. The Dunbar Number argument. It does have merit, but speaking for me personally I still want the opportunity to encounter new people or ideas that I wouldn't otherwise see. Not saying Twitter represents the ideal implementation of that, but I have discovered a lot of thoughtful people there. Yes, there are still some people like that on Twitter even though it seems otherwise.
Yeah, I've got a lot of value out of Twitter over the years. Discovered interesting things and interesting people, though I don't think I've ever developed actual meaningful relationships. But as a way to follow and discover the thoughts of interesting people, it's great.
That's part of why I'm enjoying Substack - it's enabled me to find fascinating people and have an arguably more rewarding interaction, whether in reading longer material or via comments.
That said, the rapidity of the networking and the ability to find interesting things on Twitter has yet to be matched. It's the source of most of Twitter's problems AND most of its value, so it's a thorny problem.
Exactly.
I'm not sure that Twitter was ever about community. It was more a bazaar than a community. You may have had your little area where you shopped regularly but it was still full of random encounters and strange passions. A community, on the other hand, is something formed as a place to feel comfortable and at ease with familiar people. A community turns down the noise of the world; a bazaar turns it up.
Facebook has something of the same effect, though to a lesser extent. Its algorithms too are designed to turn up the noise. Substack, on the other hand, is more about turning the noise down.
But the corollary of this is that if you want to sell ads, you would rather create a bazaar than a community. Communities tend to dislike adds. A bazaar is all about rival hawkers trying to shout each other down. The problem, with which so many services are experimenting, is how to make money running a community rather than a bazaar.
In the end, if it is not ad-supported, then it is going to be some form of user pay. Substack has its own particular model of paid subscriptions, on which I am currently freeloading because I haven't turned on paid subscriptions for my newsletter, nor have I paid to subscribe to anyone else's.
Musk may be looking at this transition from bazaar to community with his $8 verified user plan. After all, platforms that depend on advertising are captive to the agenda of their advertisers. That has become more and more blatant and partisan in recent years, and it may be that we are entering a phase in the development of the web in which people are realizing that if they want community without the noise and the intrusive agenda of the bazaar, they will have to pay for it.
The era of "people won't pay for content" may be coming to an end. That may be no bad thing.
I subscribe to Ben Thompson's Stratechery newsletter. He believes that twitter is in a unique position because the service will never be replicated. Yeah, you have the knock-offs and the clones that are out there, but you'll never get the mix of different beliefs and ideas that exists there today. In addition to that, since it's text based there is a limit to how much it can grow simply because video will always be more popular. That limit will stop other companies from trying to create a competing app because they want more revenue. For all of these reasons combined, Thompson believes that it might be possible to make everyone who uses Twitter subscribe, but it would need to be at a low price. Like three dollars a month. He also says that there's an equal chance that a move like that might kill the company, but it seems like things are headed that way already.
And there is something about Discord that turns me off. Like too many things everywhere. It feels very masculine and I hear other women also echo this sentiment.
I use it in a very specific manner. While I'm in theory on several 'larger' servers, I generally ignore them all - they're just background noise with notifications turned off. Occasionally useful for information, but generally too busy to be useful.
Where I use it on a regular basis is to connect with small, specific groups - in much the same way as WhatsApp, I suppose, but in a more flexible interface that works better across devices.
That's exactly how I use Discord. I belong to a few large servers, but they are all muted. They're just there in case I need them for something. The servers I actually use are small and exclusive to people I know I get along with.
I want to get started with Discord, but it can get overwhelming. The only I'm on is the Obsidian one, which is fun cos I'm a nerd. I do like Slack communities too - I belong to Write the Docs and they are lovely folks there.
Slack works much better for me.
Yeah, it gets a hard pass from me.
I’m with you Charlotte: Discord leaves me a little cold. I haven’t given it much of a chance yet, I’ll admit.
I think you need to find the right community - passion + right discord = great! So far, the only one I've been able to stick to was one about Obsidian, but I barely interact there.
That's an interesting observation. It's the first time I've seen someone describe Discord as being masculine. I've never thought of it that way.
I'm in a small Discord of writers. There are only 4 members. That's the only one I actively participate in on a regular basis. The large ones are just too much.
So Discord is like Whatsapp groups? lol. Just kidding. But it feels more manageable than WA for some reason.
I only use this term because I’ve only heard women complain about it and there is something very Reddit-y about it, and Reddit type spaces feel more masculine to me, but using this very loosely to mean that I think Discords appeal more to men than women.
I'm a gal and I love my reddit groups. But then again, I tend to hang in forums that are "bland" - tech writing forums, personal finance ... it's quite lovely there. I avoid the crazy places but sometimes can't help but look lol
Trans reddit groups tend to be pretty friendly and supportive.
I’ve been involved with the Web since 1994 and it has been my experience that small sites work best to build community, and by small I mean sufficient, engaged participants to establish critical mass but not so many as to destroy intimacy.
They are hard to find.
Twitter was a ‘community’ until it chose to embrace algorithms. Communication was difficult by severe limitations of post length.
Mastodon has been a community, but we’ll see how much the Twitter-fleers change the intimacy and tone.
Substack is an awkward community given the way it is set up -- for an individual not groups.
As to FB & IG ... firehoses and little individual control.
So I look for small pockets, tiny corners.
I don't really see 'Substack' as a community. It's more that individual writers I follow on Substack each over their own little micro-community. That they are using Substack is incidental and largely irrelevant (other than it being nice). So there's the interesting discussions on a couple of popular science newsletters, or there's Elle Griffin's entrepreneur-writer community, and so on. Each their own micro-community, which is why they work, IMO.
And that's what I like about it. What little community I find on Substack, I feel heard and not ignored by the din. And I get to read/listen to voices that are generally shut out from algorithms because they "don't meet guidelines" - I'm talking about the quiet musings, the unconventional thoughts of ordinary people, not influencers or people with klout. Love it.
Substack also enables disagreement and debate without it instantly descending into madness. In particular Elle posted something that I (and some others) disagreed with, but the ensuing discussion (at least as far as I saw) was civil and interesting and a useful contribution. That simply wouldn't have happened on, say, Twitter or Reddit.
I agree.
BBS for the win! 😂
Those were the days!
Indeed. Simpler days ... with much longer load times 😂
I agree with you about small sites and about the moment that Twitter started to go down hill.
I realize everyone jokes about it, but Google+ really was the best place for community. It was large enough to provide opportunities for you to find a decent-sized group of people who shared your interests, but still small enough so that you could actively participate and help shape the culture. Unfortunately, it was too small for Google so they killed it.
Substack as an awkward community is a great way to describe this place. I get that Substack really isn't trying to build a social network, but they keep adding social network features so the comparisons are bound to happen.
I'm really not sure what I think about their approach. There are things they could do that would make the site work better, but those same things would push it more into the social network model. One big thing that could improve the site is some type of public newsfeed. Of course, that also introduces the very thing that could one day kill the site because newsfeeds inevitably lead to algorithmically generated visibility controls.
The inbox reader on the web (or in the app) is doing the job for me of a 'newsfeed' - though, of course, it's of newsletters I've specifically selected to read. But that's what I want: I never had interest in the 'public' Twitter feed (that's a glimpse into madness): I just wanted to see tweets from people I follow. Same with Instagram. As those platforms moved away from that towards algorithmic "how about this!?" approaches, I became less interested.
Give me the option to network and go down rabbit holes, but don't force it upon me. All social networks have moved in the wrong direction for me.
As for Google+ - I never quite got into it. Thinking back, it was perhaps ahead of its time, in that it managed to meld 'big, wide, global' with 'small, intimate, deep' in quite a clever way. People weren't ready for it, though: it was all about the mass networking and instant fix of Facebook and Twitter back then.
I understand your points about newsfeeds and largely agree with them. I just want some way of finding more rabbit holes to explore when I stumble across something of interest. The existing setup does offer that-- to a degree-- because it allows me to go see the publications you've decided to list on your profile that you read, ones you recommend, and to check out the profiles of people who have commented here.
I think if Substack spent more time improving categories and search results (which to their credit are vastly improved over what they used to be) then I wouldn't feel the need for the serendipitous discovery that a public newsfeed can offer.
Did you ever try Openbook/Openspace/Okuna? There were a ton of G+ folks there. It didn't make it, ofc. I don't know where everyone went after that.
T Van Santana, I used Openspace/Openbook and then later Okuna. I stuck with them through the Okuna rebranding. Last I heard they were struggling financially and not having luck at getting more funding. Do you know if they are still online?
They are not—at least not as Okuna. Joel started a new network called Somus, but I really don't know anything about it beyond the name and that they were recruiting celebrity users.
Celebrity users. Everyone wants to go that route. I mean I get it, but I wish someone would try a different approach every now and then.
Ikr? Would be nice.
This is something I have been thinking about recently. In a pre-Twitter world (from what I can remember lol), I would maybe hear about a blog or website and add it to my Google Reader (RIP) feed. And then would rely on those blogs to learn about other blogs worth following. But it was a much slower and much random-er process. As I tried to read every entry from each blog I followed, I was hesitant to add new ones.
That all got supercharged with Twitter, where you could follow a lot more people and not feel like you had to read every tweet from someone (although I certainly tried). And from the people I followed, I learned about podcasts and Facebook groups and Discords that I could join.
Facebook groups and Discord servers are great for forming a community, but the downside is the network effects needed to make those communities worthwhile. I'm in a number of Discord servers where it is basically the same unifying principle and it would really be better if there was only one server. So I find myself not really participating. Twitter doesn't have that problem because everyone is on it and you can interact with everyone.
I do think that Substack encourages community-building around the particular publication and I'm more likely to comment and interact where the writers are fostering discussion and responding to comments, like you are Simon. I'm excited to test out the Chats feature on my own newsletter once it's rolled out to Android and web.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how the new chat feature affects things. A lot of Substacks have "join my Discord!" as a perk, which has never interested me much - it's too separate and 'over there', and it'd just make Discord even noisier. I'm very curious to see how it works within Substack.
No interest in the chat feature as a reader or a writer. But it's relatively unobtrusive, so whatever.
Optional features are fine - much like the podcast and video stuff - and can sit in the toolbox for people who find them useful.
Right. If it's not really in my way, that's great for whoever wants or needs it. Makes no difference to me.
Exactly. There is so much value in not having to go somewhere else to interact with authors whose work you enjoy.
I like that the chat function is attached to the publication. I don't want to/need to set-up an entire Discord server and channels just so I can chat with my subscribers.
I do wonder how much busier this place will be when the Chat feature is rolled out to Android. I know several Android users who are eagerly waiting for the feature to be added to their app.
Yes, will be interesting to see. I also think that having the Chat feature on web will be very important. I wonder if the Chat will be more real-time or more like the post comments.
As it is now, it's basically the same threaded comments you see on posts. It has a dedicated tab in the app. When you click on that tab, you'll see a list of all of the publications to which you subscribe who are using chat. Click on one of the publications and you'll see any post they've made. Click on the post to read it and see comments or to reply.
I really hope they never enable real-time chat. I like to respond to comments in my own time rather than having to try to get everyone on the same schedule so we can all talk.
The way Substack works currently also encourages a certain level of intellectual rigour - varying depending on the subject matter, writer style etc of course - which is only really possible with longer-form posts and responses. Just take this thread, for example: every response here is nuanced and considered, and the discussion is all the richer for it.
It encourages writing rather than shouting.
'Faster' chat could mess that up quite considerably.
As I have written recently I've left Twitter and I am still working out community. I have a limited presence on most other sites but I am trying out Mastodon and some Discords. And there's the Substack community itself. I still have hopes for a true global network but it seems like it could be an unsolvable problem.
I like the idea of what Jack Dorsey seems to be trying to achieve with BlueSky. As I understand it, it's a protocol that would allow services like Mastodon to remain decentralized, but more easily interact with disparate servers.
I think web culture has changed too. I'm like you in that I want the convenience of a centralized network, but I think what we're seeing is the increasing bifurcation between social media and private chat. You have things like Facebook and Twitter where you post things that may or may not be seen by your friends because of the algorithms, but then you also have things like private Discords or WhatsApp where you can send messages to a small group of friends who will see your message. Private chat has grown, I think, because everyone has started to realize how unreliable posting to the established social networks is.
Absolutely, John. And I think a lot of people thought of Facebook in particular as a form of 'private chat'. You'd post stuff and your friends/family would see it, and vice versa, but in a more relaxed way than having a dedicated 'chat room'. As Meta forced in ads, then increasing amounts of algorithmic bilge, it diluted that early promise to the point where it no longer exists. At which point Facebook has no purpose - and, as you point out, people have started going elsewhere to find those close family/friend connections.
The ad-driven model simply doesn't supported a properly curated experience, which is incompatible with a good social experience. Substack works for me because it's got 3 levels of curation: my own, that of other writers (ie recommendations and so on) and Substack's (search and light touch discovery on the 'Discover' page). But it's all driven by my selections and my curation - and they can do that because their model is built around writers getting paid.
Ad-driven works slightly better, I'd say, for purely entertainment platforms - the likes of YouTube and TikTok. Those are less about community and more about being entertained, for which an algorithmic approach works slightly better. Slightly.
Exactly. The other day I was reading an article and someone said, "If I was running late and I needed my wife to pick up the kids from school, I wouldn't post that on Facebook because there's no guarantee if or when she would ever see it. I'd send it to her in a private message where delivery was guaranteed."
Exactly, John, exactly.
I quit Twitter a few months ago so I don’t know what is happening there. I never really liked it. I liked Facebook in 2008 when it was just my friends and I having funny conversations. But when the share button appeared and allowed people to use other people’s content, it started going downhill. And when it became a soapbox for political ranting I was done with it.
I agree with small is better for community. The larger a Discord gets, the harder it is to follow and the more it feels like social media. I find the best community in my Substack comments right now. I haven’t activated the chat feature yet. It is a little one-sided since only the newsletter owner (or contributors) can start a conversation. And I don’t really want another daily chore of thinking up a chat question.
I used to get a great creative writer community feeling on Medium, but that died a few years ago with the Partner Program change.
Outside of writing, I have built a community of both followers and fellow musicians with my acoustic trio on TikTok. There is a community of people who follow a specific group of musicians and attend their livestreams. Through that community (and livestream interaction), I have gotten to know the other musicians. We even coordinate our livestream schedules and promote each other. Since the start of the year my band has gone from 0 to 44k followers.
Twitter is, at least, still Twitter. Largely the same original product, for better or worse. The odd thing about all the Meta-owned products is that they started off well, and then were slowly transformed into far worse products. They're really a collective warning about allowing algorithms to dictate content.
In the end it is people who ruin social media. The owners and the users are both to blame. Less is more, in my opinion. 🙂
I've seen posts from writers and artists begging people not to leave Twitter because that's how they promote their work, network and make more business contacts. I feel for them, but it's also a valuable lesson on why we writers cannot depend on "rented land" to do our business. Which is why I've always prioritised setting up and building content on my website and maintaining a mailing list.
That said, I couldn't take my eyes off the Twitter drama. I don't like Musk in general. I think he's a narcissist, not a genius like everyone says he is because he's great at one thing: Buying innovations and touting it as his own. Granted, he is a good businessman. A ruthless one - and I suppose that's why people love him. He makes the hard decisions and don't care how it looks on him. But imagine having that kind of person running one of the world's most powerful media outlets? Frightening. In my country, where "cybertroopers" are deployed during election time to smear the opposition online, Twitter will be a playground.
I've been following how my favourite authors - most of them heavy Twitter users - are reacting. I think everyone's knows Stephen King's infamous conversation with Elon Musk. Some have decided to leave completely. It's sad, because I think Twitter needs dissenting voices. If it truly is becoming a "hellhole" we need some angels to balance things out.
I'm staying on Twitter, however. I have a very carefully cultivated feed. I only interact with good, fun people. I've met interesting people this way. And I generally enjoy the chatter on my feed. But sometimes my tweeps get frustrated and start ranting and that attracts trolls and ... yeah, it's unavoidable to pissed off at least once a day on Twitter! lol
I do engage with folks not of my world view - as long as they are nice and balanced and willing to hold civil discourse. Unfortunately ... that doesn't seem to happen much these days!
Yep, it's why the advice has always been to build a mailing list. It's an asset you properly own, and you can shift it from place to place if needed. That's another great thing about Substack - at the moment it's the best thing for me to use, but I'm also secure in the knowledge I can migrate elsewhere if I need to, without losing anything.
(that said, they're adding more and more features at the moment which would make moving away increasingly painful)
Many of these features aren't that great, though. Feels gimmicky. The actual improvements to functionality of the core parts of publishing are good, but everything else is a distraction. I'm meeting a lot of people because of them, though! People are pissed 😂
Nothing like a good grumble to bring people together. :P
Exactly! Misery and company and all that.
Interestingly, I’ve discovered more writer people over on Twitter since Friday than I have in any 48 hour period since I signed up over 2 years ago. Then, yesterday, horse Twitter took off running in the wake of the Breeders Cup and the retirement of several prominent stallions to stud.
I’m on Twitter, still, but my curation is starting to look more like it did on Facebook during 2016–one strike and you’re blocked. I’ve expanded it to aggressive Mastodon-explaining techies who can’t seem to take “it doesn’t work for me” as a response. They possess an evangelical fervor akin to crypto bros or people who think Open/Libre Office is wonderful and everyone should use it. Generally, oddly enough, they’re also low-follower, recent accounts.
I’ve added Counter Social to my list. Once someone stops DDOSing it, it should be a great place. It used to be part of Mastodon but it’s its own thing now. Lots of eclectic interests and…I’ve met even more writers! It doesn’t seem to be a site for aggressive promotion but subtle seems to work as well.
Replacing Twitter professionally is going to be hard simply because of the degree of networking that happens there. I’ve landed several interviews and learned about publishing opportunities that don’t get duplicated elsewhere.
Discord—I may create my own whatever-you-call-it there, but for now, I’m part of several writing Discords—including SFWA, Substack, Kindle Vella Writers, a couple I learned about through Twitter—and several science fiction convention Discords focused on virtual convention running.
Other than that, I’m going to try to get more long-form posting such as Substack going. Now that I’ve had cataract surgery, a lot of this stuff seems to be easier to think about. But I have to ramp up because I realized I’ve seriously ramped down as a response to a fast-moving cataract.
Another wonderful positive of Substack is that communities often form around podcasts, but in the past, podcast hosts had to use other platforms to host their community chats. Now Substack allows podcasters to keep everyone in one place on one app.
Yes! That's something I really want to delve into at some point. I produced a podcast for several years called The Writing Life, which has a good listenership but there was no real feedback loop to speak of. Substack would definitely have helped with that.
it great as writers we have choice my trouble is sticking to one. I have not long started substack but I really like using it and I find more people open my emails I am slowly shifting my newsletter subscribers over I never did like twitter however
As an NFT poet, I’m not ditching Twitter yet, but yes to Discord and Substack too :)
I never left Ello. And they're finally getting around to rebuilding it, so that's nice. But those of us who stayed, have had a nice lowkey community of writers, artists, and musicians for about seven or eight years now. It's super chill.
Interesting, I don't think I've ever heard of Ello! The last decade I think has slowly made us start to realise that small can = better, online.
It had 15 minutes of fame in 2015 or so as the "Facebook Killer"--which was a ridiculous idea, that people would abandon FB over their name policy. Sure, people were mad, but they weren't gonna leave for good over it. Then, whenever that tumblr mature content policy change happened, a lot of folks from tumblr came over. But mostly it's the same faces from the old days who stick around. We do get a few new folks every now and then that hang out for awhile. Look me up if you ever wander that way and I'll introduce you: https://ello.co/tvansantana
I can't really think of anything online I would dub a "community," other than spaces delegated to specific topics - i.e. "The VFX Community," or "The Doctor Who Community," and those are directed discussion rooms. This applies to Reddit, Discord, or the FXhome/ActionVFX forums, either "Chan," et.al. Pretty much everything has self-sectioned into small topics and illustrates the nigh-unavoidable truism that when you lock enough "like minded" people into a shared space they will either ossify, close ranks and gatekeep, or tear themselves apart with petty internal struggle. I've withdrawn from all Reddit and Discord groups/servers I was in and only keep the accounts so no one else can create accounts with my email addresses (which did happen on two platforms and took awhile to sort out)
Whatsapp is basically encrypted SMS/MMS messaging. It requires your phone number, allows you to send texts, voice, photo and short video clips, and the only reason I'm on it is because no Irish phone providers handle MMS anymore - but it's literally the same functionality given by standard cell phone service in the USA. Except "encrypted." Which means diddly/(squat^2) given how many Whatsapp threads have been entered into evidence to things like the J6 committee.
Facebook and Twitter are relatively unique in that they really are soapboxes to allow one to spew whatever they wish into the digital ether for all and sundry to see. Facebook, of course, allows Groups and/or filtering your posts to only be seen by your mutual contacts - or subsets of your mutual contacts (aka "Friends" and "Close Friends"). Their potential community aspects have more or less been overriden by algorithmic filtering and abuse of such by bad actors. Still, I will maintain my accounts there - again, solely to prevent others from creating accounts using my emails.
Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Vimeo, et.al. are NOT "social media communities," they are shared gallery apps that may or may not allow comments. In most cases, except one, which will come up below), I maintain my accounts solely to keep my emails locked up. I'm sensing a theme, here.
Dunno. Closest I can think of to online communities are the old Yahoo Messenger rooms. Perhaps I'm biased, for there I'd met people who have been friends - actual friends - for decades.
The aforementioned FXhome forum had a community feel for quite a while, and may be the only other online place where I've met people I would consider "friends" - Hi, Simon! - but, sadly, that place changed for the worse about 14 months ago and has become negative, bordering on toxic.
I have few other insights and no true solutions or suggestions. I am slowly withdrawing from the online spaces I used to frequent (I'm even transferring my Hitfilm University YouTube channel over to Film Sensei Jay Haynes to allow him to continue maintaining the ever growing Playlists of tutorials - and Simon, you've known me long enough and well enough to understand that is highly significant withdrawal...as well as the exception to maintaining an account to lock up the associated email address. The email address in this case can be closed) , and am trying to consolidate those people who I actually care about away from being spread across multiple sites. This likely means returning to direct messaging via Whatsapp or similar client or returning to good old email.
The two best online communities I've known were forum-based. A Usenet group in the 90s, alt.babylon5.uk, was a wonderful place - again, centred around a specific interest, but actually just a bunch of people who got along. And then the 2000s-era fxhome community (which not coincidentally spawned a LOT of talented filmmakers).
The key thing about usenet and old school forums is that they encouraged longer posts, slower responses and deeper thinking - all things which I'm finding recreated here on Substack, albeit in a different context (here it's all about individual writers).
I find it encouraging that there's a seeming shift back towards more considered online debate.
Excellent point!
Loving the Substack community. I was never a big Twitter user, but find myself using it more and more lately because IG and FB have gotten so bad and full of bots and ads and people impersonating my account. A year ago I would have said IG was my biggest community, but I’m super annoyed with that platform also since reels.
I’m excited about Elon’s Twitter takeover because I think he’s a brilliant visionary genius and I LOVE my Tesla 3, so I’m curious how things will turn out.
IMO Teslas are at least 5x better than any regular car so to me there is no compelling reason to think Twitter won’t improve over time.
I think Musk has been good for tech, because he has money and some big ideas which he's enabled cleverer people to go execute. Hence SpaceX and Tesla, both of which are pretty amazing.
I used to think he was a visionary genius, but over the years I've changed my view on him - I think he's a very rich man with a couple of really interesting big ideas and a lot of really, really, really bad ideas and bad takes on how people and the world work.
I also think he's wildly unsuited to a societal/community challenge. He approaches everything as if it's a tech issue, and the last decade has fairly definitively shown that isn't the case. In fact, a Silicon Valley, tech-bro approach to society seems to lead to disaster.
For me, him calling a British rescuer of the Thai cave kids a 'pedo' was the tipping point when I had to admit that Musk is, in fact, quite an unpleasant and rather odd person.
I'd love to drive a Tesla, though. ;)
Eew have not heard about that cave pedo thing. He does have ASD1... so... def gonna have different way of thinking. Did you watch his recent full discussion with Ron Barron? I watched the whole thing last night and it restored my hope. I found it very inspiring.
I haven't seen that, no. If he kept to tech challenges and opportunities I think it'd be fine. That's where he's had cool idea and has helped fund genuinely exciting stuff. The way Tesla has forced the electric vehicle market forward is vital stuff. He's just really, really bad at most other things - especially when he wades into social or political issues.
I own Teslas myself and agree.
👏👏👏👏👏 honestly, the best! And as they become even cheaper, more people will understand this reality.