Once upon a time there was Myspace. It was my first taste of social media as we know it today and, if I’m honest, I don’t remember much about it. It was narrowly customizable and it was social in a handful of weird ways. I remember that your first “friend,” Tom Anderson, wasn’t actually a friend at all but a stranger in Los Angeles.
There’s probably some lesson in that.
My social media experience proceeded in fits and starts. I picked up Facebook and dropped it. I picked up Twitter and dropped it. I tried other, experimental sites. I never really fit in any of those spaces. I never saw that as a deficiency. I’ve always been a little different, a little weird, a lot disagreeable. So it made sense to me that the thing everyone was doing wasn’t really for me. It’s like sports. Who cares? Everyone but me.
I spent years without social media and while this put some people off I noticed that it was all the right people. Most of my adulthood (i.e., post-2010) I’ve been “offline”.
Late last year I picked up X and while the experience has been mixed it’s mostly been negative. I put so much effort into trying to avoid the ugliness and unkindness that flourishes there. The differences between Twitter under Jack Dorsey and X under Elon Musk are much smaller than many people suggest. The site’s always encouraged a weird mix of sanitized corporate-speak and unhinged vitriol. Enough is enough.
So I started to make a plan to move my online presence to Substack.
I thought about what I posted on X and what I’d post on Substack. I made new plans to change my writing. I wrote, wrote, wrote more than I ever have. Thirty-four daily posts from June 1 to July 4! It felt good, mostly, to be writing so much, even if the writing usually lacked polish and sometimes a point. “Writing is strength training,” I wrote, and that’s right! It is! But what are you writing and where and why?
Every time you write a post on Substack it generates a slug for the post. What’s a slug? It’s everything after the .com, basically, a unique string that helps people find your post on the web. In “example.com/slug” the “/slug” is the slug.
I would always double-check the new slug before posting and something about doing this unnerved me. Domain names have always been a fixation for me. Earlier, I wrote about how I’ve always been interested in the words for things, in names. It was natural for me to be interested in domain names once I learned about them. If a name represents a person, place, or thing in the real world, a domain name or handle does the same for you in the online world. Seeing my writing appended to “substack.com” was a weird feeling. Why am I putting my writing, my thoughts, my feelings, myself, on someone else’s website? It feels wrong! It feels wrong because it is wrong.
So this is my announcement that I’m leaving. Not the web. But X and Substack. There are plenty of nice people in both places but there are also actual sociopaths and much, much worse, not to mention the people running the sites themselves.
Are the people who run X and Substack bad people? Mostly not, no. Mostly they’re normal people. But there’s a conflict of interest here that a lot of people seem to miss. The people running these sites are self-interested. You and I, we’re also self-interested. Much of the time these interests, between the sites and us, are aligned. But sometimes they’re not. I don’t see much point to sticking around for those times!
The web was built by people with interoperability and independence in mind. So many brilliant, altruistic people came together in coordinated and uncoordinated processes to build a web where anyone can have their own domain name and website. That’s where I’m going with this post. That’s where I’m going with my writing. My site’s not ready yet. But it will be! And when it is, I think I’ll finally be done with “social” media.
My Substack experiment has been so much fun. It’s actually changed my thinking and writing. I definitely plan to continue writing regularly. But not here.
Thank you for reading my Substack! Maybe I’ll see you at ericsilver.com.