The Genesis and Evolution of Social Platforms
The birth of new social platforms on the internet is interesting. Where the natural world stumbled upon the seemingly miraculous mix of ingredients and processes to bootstrap a living, breathing organism over the course of millions of years, we stand on the shoulders of countless forebears, and launch magic missile after magic missile over the horizon, armed with ingenuity, hope, determination, naiivety, and at times incredible stupidity.
Building computer software begins as an exercise in faith. Where there was nothing, we construct something. A deluge of keystrokes, compilation, installation, and configuration results in an intellectual idea taking physical form within the brain of the machine. We connect the machines together via invented protocols, and suddenly we have a grida weba world the users use to forge new paths of communication, to find new audiences, and to put down roots.
The first wave of usersthe explorersbegin populating the landscape with original, high quality content. They invite their peers, and discussions recursively extend into every corner of the landscapepicking apart existing functionality, and speculating about emerging use-cases.
For a time, the landscape achieves a panacea of sorts. Mistakes are corrected, and the platform slowly evolves.
What happens next could be described as either “lucky”, or “unlucky”, depending on perspective. The wider world learns of the “new place”.
An army of expectant, ignorant, self righteous users will arrive (the “hipsters”), eager to stake a claim in a giant pissing competition of global proportions. If things go really badly, the “normals” will also arriveoutnumbering their hipster infantry ten to one, and displaying shocking levels of entitlement.
You never can tell which platforms will attract the swarmthe popularity of one platform over another rarely follows logic.
What happens next is an even bigger mystery.
If the crowd stay around for long enough, they forge bonds with the emergent platform, no matter how badly broken, designed, or conceived it is. They defend their idiosyncratic home against any and allwaging flame wars with little provocation to protect their past investment.
Somewhere along the way, a significant section of the original settlers leavedrifting back to familiar shores, murmuring about returning to their people. And so we discover the true nature of the social internet;The majority of people expect the world to be given to them on a stick. They are unwilling to invest significant effort in building, or evolving a better situation for themselves and their peers. If a world, appearance, image, or projected personality cannot be conjured or bought without effort, then the platform will cease to be of interest, and will begin a long quiet slide towards obscurity and death.