Social media is shifting beneath our feet as Twitter’s catabolism notches upward with its latest move to limit who can view tweet threads. It’s also been fascinating, over the past several months, to watch companies jostling to position their own text-chat services. Mastodon, Post.news, Bluesky, Substack Notes, and Instagram Threads each offer their own view of “an online conversation,” but so far, none seems to have matched or exceeded the secret sauce that sparked Twitter’s exponential insinuation into pop culture.
I’m thinking about this because I joined Threads today, and it feels pretty active and vibrant, but it’s early days. Mastodon felt pretty darn vibrant after the initial Twitter exodus in November 2022, too. I still enjoy Mastodon, but it didn’t become an addiction, maybe because activity in my feed dropped off after a few weeks.
More generally across social media services, I see several factors working in opposing directions, some attracting loyalty and attention while others repel it. Drama does both, making it probably the most interesting factor!1
Let’s go through these factors one at a time:
Attraction Factors
Ease: This one’s pretty simple: the easier it is to get started and to use a service, the more people will do it, and the more often they will visit. An easy-to-use design goes a long way. (Mastodon struggles a bit here, in my opinion, though I’m glad it exists.) Twitter’s latest move seems so mind-boggling to me because it hurts ease of use.
Discovery: Discovery is one of the great unsolved internet problems. How do you find other people with similar interests, and how do they find you, amid the cacophony of sheer numbers and volume online? In general, social media platforms tend to have better discovery in their early days, when they have fewer users, and it gets progressively worse as time passes and as power users accumulate followers, outpacing everyone else and centralizing the webs of interconnections around themselves. It becomes much more difficult for a late joiner to connect in a meaningful way with the broader network. (TikTok’s reasonable discovery for new users’ videos even after it became popular is, in my opinion, also what made it so popular. People are hungry for discovery aka opportunity.)
Unobserved intrusiveness: If a social network is good at suggesting things you’ll like, you’ll probably enjoy using it more. But how do they get enough data to suggest things you’ll like? You might not like the answer. Still, many people like the end result, as long as they don’t feel intruded upon.
Inclusive exclusivity: It can feel reassuring to feel like part of an in-crowd. Unfortunately, the existence of an in-crowd means there’s also an out-crowd. As I see it, an ugly side of social media, highlighted by the rise of influencers, is that it thrives on what I’ll call “inclusive exclusivity.” Social media services may want you to feel like they’re inclusive clubs… but they’re still clubs. Anyone can make an account, but the winner-take-all nature of online popularity can provoke envy, stress, and an in-crowd/out-crowd culture.
Perceived importance of dialogue (aka can’t-miss internet): If important conversations are happening on a social media service, they attract other users. The sheer numbers of celebrities and public figures on Twitter and Instagram make those services can’t-miss internet for vast swaths of people. It’s a success-to-the-successful loop in action.
Repellent Factors
Ads: Ads fund many internet sites, but they clutter my feeds with content I didn’t ask for and may not care to see. I’ve clicked on some news stories and immediately closed the tab because there were just too many ads for my brain to even care about the content I (previously) wanted to see. Clean, uncluttered interfaces that deliver what they promised are attractive. Ads are not usually that (yes, there are brilliant exceptions).
Fees: The first mention of web micropayments was back in the 1990s. That model never caught on, probably because no one likes to feel constantly nickel-and-dimed (witness the annoying “please tip” screens at seemingly every counter-service venue in real life). And it’s also really hard to convince people to pay for content on the internet via a subscription model, especially when that content used to be free; just ask most newspapers. Essentially, Twitter tried re-branding a free feature that conferred status and promoted trust (“this person is who they say they are”) into a pay-to-play status subscription; the verified-checkmark ruckus may have (hopefully) convinced other text-conversation apps not to try that particular approach.
Observed intrusiveness: Intrusiveness becomes a repellent when people become aware of it, since most people don’t like to feel spied on. Witness the innumerable privacy dust-ups stemming from some social media companies’ past changes to preferences and features on short notice.
Both Attractor and Repellent
Drama: Drama draws people like flies to carrion. Sometimes it’s can’t-miss internet, but it can easily cross the line into criminal or near-criminal harassment and push people toward other services. On balance, as the book LikeWar eloquently shows, drama draws more people than it repels. This is an unfortunate reflection of human nature.
Takeaways
Which way will the internet-water-cooler tug-of-war resolve? Maybe Twitter will stop teetering and stabilize. Maybe it will be supplanted by a newcomer or a few. Maybe there will be no direct replacement, and someone will come up with something even better. Whatever happens, the factors above will play key roles.
The right balance of drama was almost certainly key to Twitter’s popularity in its heyday. But that was an unstable equilibrium; it’s easy for a social media service to slide too far toward unpleasantness or, conversely, become too staid or sparsely populated to keep attracting repeat visits. In my view, Instagram and Substack have struck this balance best with their core products; it’s possible to curate a vibrant and respectful Instagram feed as a regular user, and Substack is a haven of thoughtful, nuanced discussion.
Thanks for this interesting analysis. You're brave to have account on all of these. Twitter was a combination of too many ads and too much other content I didn't want to see and I walked away some time ago. I opened an account in Instagram, discovered it didn't work on a browser and gave up immediately (I don't do much on my phone).
What a thoughtful, objective analysis. I’ve never heard of Mastadon and a few others mentioned. What ever happened to Clubhouse?