There Is No Twitter 2
Internet communities don't transplant. They die and move on. The question is, what's coming next?
For those who grew up any later than the early 2000s or so, the following might not mean anything to you, but to my fellow 80s and 90s kids: I spent a good healthy chunk of my life as a forum moderator. An internet cop.
I don’t mean “my life” as though it was the only thing I had going on, obviously (hopefully obvious) but it was hardly insignificant. These were the days when spending a significant amount of time on the internet was still something that really only nerds and introverts did, rather than something the vast majority of normal people do as a matter of day to day necessity.
This is only 15-10 years ago, during the last part of the first iteration of the Web. The popular comparison that gets thrown about, that of the Wild West, isn’t that inaccurate. We were all very loosely federated states back then, each a fiefdom with its own laws. I was probably a member of at least six large forums in 2003, each attached to a private website based around some individual fandom or hobby. By 2005-2007, these fandoms had coalesced into something like 5 very large forums, with much broader scope. Nobody had any idea they were the primordial soup that would become something called “social media.”
My kingdom was David Wong’s Pointless Waste of Time, based around the work of comedian and novelist Jason Pargin. It would eventually be absorbed into the entertainment website Cracked, while retaining much of its long standing culture. Other very large forums, some of which are still standing today through the sheer force of their inertia and notoriety, are Something Awful and 4Chan.
These forums are the Old Gods of the internet. Something Awful was Zeus holding a lightning bolt made of dicks. 4Chan was cackling Hades sitting on a fiery throne made of dicks. PWOT was clownish Loki with just a whole mess of dicks all over the place, dropping out of the sky, what I’m trying to say was that we had a real thing for dick jokes back then and it’s difficult to explain why, just crazy.
To this day, some of my best friends—real ones, out here in meatspace—I met on the PWOT forums.
The weird thing, and something that seems difficult to believe today, is that back then, sure, we did have people coming in shrieking about censorship and the mods violating their First Amendment Rights, but we all made fun of those people and nobody begrudged us for it. There were no Nazis on PWOT. There were never any discussions about whether there should be Nazis on PWOT. It was house rules, and there was no value in having a bunch of Proud Boys in the house even to laugh at.
Eventually the social landscape of the internet gave birth to something called Facebook. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was the forum-killer. It didn’t look like a forum, not at all, not even a little bit. It was something else that coexisted alongside forums, at least at first. But it was nevertheless made of the same stuff as forums. It had forums in its DNA.
What Facebook was, it turned out, was a cancer of the forum. Stripped of the natural barriers to growth that imposed limits on the conceivable size of a forum, it was free to grow infinitely and ultimately choke out and kill its host. It didn’t do it alone. It was merely the first and most successful of what we now call social media or a social network. What replaced the Wild West was something we started calling Web 2.0.
Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, these are the New Gods. They don’t look like forums any more than a car looks like a horse, but they killed the buggy industry just the same.
There were discussions about whether there should be Nazis on Web 2.0. For some reason on this new internet the answer seems to be pretty resoundingly yes. The scale of the social network virtually demands it. There is a kind of special pleading, a morbid advocacy, the drum beat of where else are they expected to go? Freedom of speech renders all points of view equally valid, and if not Twitter then where are they supposed to go? I mean apart from Gab, or Parler, or Truth Social, or shit, 4Chan, 8Chan, 8Kun, 12Chan, 14Chan, KunChan, Chan Social, ChanChan, or KiwiFarms, apart from all of those, where else are they supposed to go? This ain’t the old internet with its sundown towns for undesirables. We don’t take kindly to terms of service around here.
When PWOT was terminated in 2019, due to business realities, there were some of us who had been there for over 15 years and we just felt punched in the gut. It can’t be overstated how hard we dug our nails into what we were set to lose. After the begging and pleading came to no avail, we were eventually faced with the task of setting up an alternative. We threw around ideas like alternative forums, or a subreddit, anywhere that could take on and host refugees from the old internet, those of us who liked the cosy, personal, small scale nature of forums.
These efforts failed. Why? Simply, the reason the forum died in the first place was we weren’t using it anymore. Mods outnumbered users. It was a cop city. Or really more of a cop water cooler that took up an immense amount of server space. We desperately wanted our forums back but we didn’t replace them because forums are over. They are just over.
See, we are, all of us, petty and nostalgic and fickle animals. We don’t want change and we don’t want to replace our toys. When the old toys break beyond repair we don’t want new toys that look the same, because they’re not the same, and they will never be the same, and we’re always going to know that in the backs of our minds. We stamp our feet and cry about it.
What’s happening now, you may have noticed, is that this cycle is cranking up again. Do you feel it on the wind? The whispers in the air that tell reports of the collapse of Buzzfeed and Vice in the same week, whispers of AI consuming every industry like… well, like another hungry tumour birthed from what came before. Web 2.0 is creaking. It didn’t take long, but then, despite how drawn out time feels in our youth, the first incarnation of the web didn’t stick around for long either.
The two power players of social media, Facebook and Twitter, are going about the business of transforming into something else. Web 3, whatever it is, is scratching at the door.
The denizens of Twitter aren’t ready to leave any more than we forum users were ready to leave at the end, but the tempestuous crypto bro who launched a very hostile takeover of the platform is extremely determined to force the issue. So people have started asking: Where do the refugees go?
The erroneous assumption is that where the refugees of Twitter wind up is going to look like Twitter. But if history has any intention of repeating itself—that is, if human nature acts like human nature—there is very little chance that where we wind up planting ourselves next is going to be Twitterish. We’ve already turned our nose up at the Not-Quite-Twitters because they’re Not Quite Twitter. It was only a couple of months ago that we were definitely all going to Mastodon.
Remember Mastodon?
Post, Counter Social, shit we were even going to give Instagram another shot. The newest popular kids are Substack Notes and BlueSky, specifically because they’re like Twitter and specifically because they piss off Elon Musk. They’re all perfectly good options. But we’re deluding ourselves. We’re feet-stamping the same as we did when the forums shuttered. We’re bargaining and threatening the New Gods to let us keep our toys.
But, like it or not, and we don’t, Web 2.0 is finishing. Twitter is finishing. We’re not going to settle for something that looks the same but smells funny. We can stamp our feet all we like, but…
It’s going to be fuckin’ TikTok, isn’t it.
Look, I don’t like this any more than you do, but it’s TikTok. Look at this shit, just look at it:
It’s here and it’s won. I don’t have the face for it, you don’t have the face for it, we’re all ugly as sin, I know, I get it, but you better start practicing that floss dance, or whatever, because this is our nightmare now.
Are there Nazis on TikTok? Brother, I don’t even know.
Can we have forums back??
Thinking I'm maybe 5-10 years older, as I have a very similar experience but based around the mid-90s to the mid-2000s. That was really proto-internet stuff, with usenet forums that required special software to even access them. No web browsers for us! Again, those communities grew out of fandoms (the TV show Babylon 5 for me) and then turned into places people just hung out. I met several members of the group in person, which in the 90s was a fairly revolutionary (nay, DANGEROUS and CONTROVERSIAL) thing to do.
Usenet withered into forums, and for a time I was heavily into the indie/amateur filmmaking scene. Still remember the 50+ page political discussions that remained largely civil throughout, had a huge range of ages, including kids, and felt like everyone was getting something out of it.
It occurred to me towards the end of last year that I haven't really enjoyed the internet since those days. Not in terms of community.
Thoroughly enjoying Notes so far, but that's because it's nothing like Twitter despite the interface similarities.
I wonder how much of this is simpler than we think, and purely generational-based. People in their teens and 20s use something voraciously, then they get older and have kids, and the kids don't want to go anywhere near the same places their parents hang out, and those platforms die as new ones springs up.
I like the idea of Mastodon. Instances feel like the general discussion thread on a 2004 forum. The moderation is pretty much based on the whims of whoever is paying the server costs (much like a 2004 forum). The instance I'm on had a guy called Nutsling (also much like a 2004 forum). The federated tab is garbage though.
Nazis are absolutely on tiktok and they will report you if you say Nazis are bad, and you will get banned because you said "Nazi" when you said "Nazis are bad".