Web 2.0 is Trying to Die, But We Won't Let It

The internet is rejecting the old social media models like a bad organ transplant - is it time to lay them to rest?

Back in the mid 2000s the comedy writer and my former boss Jason Pargin, then writing under the pseudonym David Wong, wrote one of the essays he wound up being best known for—because we are, all of us, cursed to have our early work remain our most notable forever. (It is yet unknown whether I’ve already written the most popular thing I will ever write, and I think I’d like that to stay unknown, for my sanity).

The article was What Is the Monkeysphere?, and I’ve linked it here if you can manage to read it properly through nearly two decades of Cracked’s failing web infrastructure threatening to collapse the old articles into unsalvageable data rubble. It’s essentially an essay about Dunbar’s number, which is kind of the upper limit on how many people we can have around before we start acting like a bunch of sociopaths toward some of them because there’s just too many individuals. Societies begin to break down at scale. Everyone outside your monkeysphere becomes a faceless entity you call Some Dipshit.

It's just the one single reason society doesn't work.

It's like this: which would upset you more, your best friend dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a truck hauling killer bees? Which would hit you harder, your Mom dying, or seeing on the news that 15,000 people died in an earthquake in Iran?

They're all humans and they are all equally dead. But the closer to our Monkeysphere they are, the more it means to us. Just as your death won't mean anything to the Chinese or, for that matter, hardly anyone else more than 100 feet or so from where you're sitting right now.

It’s important to note that Twitter did not exist when Pargin wrote this. What passed for “social media” at the time existed as relatively small island communities called internet forums—spaces of maybe a couple of thousand people in larger examples, still larger than the monkeysphere but pretty easily moderated by a handful of volunteers.

There wasn’t really a natural pressure to grow these communities much larger. When Facebook gave birth to what we now call “Web 2.0”—the social media era—it still began as an app for personal friends and family. But there was potential for infinite growth.

With Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, strange new pressures took over that overwhelmed our instincts to keep our communities small. Our monkeysphere didn’t get any larger, there was still a limit to how many people we could interact with and think of as friends, but now we became addicted to the tyranny of the rising line. We could collect people like Pokemon, now. There would always be a limit to how many people we could have in our sphere, but there was no limit to the number of people whose spheres we could be in.

Twitter came along finally and said fuck it. Fuck it. Dump everyone in the same room. Novelists, actors, stand up comedians, sex workers, gamers, Taliban operatives, you, me, the manager of your local Walgreens, billionaires, ideologues, future school shooters, philosophers, Dril (but I repeat myself), doctors, conspiracy theorists, and the President of the United States. Same room.

Twitter

It was a revolution in communication, it was unfathomably addictive, and it turned us into absolutely the worst versions of ourselves imaginable.

Elon Musk wanted to wrangle control of it and just wound up bludgeoning it to death in the effort. What happened next is going to go down as a classic learning moment in tech.

Substack, as of 2023, was doing well. The platform came along at just the right time when the internet was beginning to experiment with new ways to assert itself because the old ways just didn’t seem to be working out too great. As more and more of the internet coalesced into fewer and fewer distinct, gigantic websites, people felt drowned out. Our natural desire to feel like our voices were being heard wasn’t being satisfied. Blogs, which had gone out of fashion, started to come back in. They gave us breathing room.

But Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are addictive. Quite literally addictive. Take someone’s phone away and see how long it takes them to start behaving like a junkie who lost their stash. Zuckerberg and Elon Musk respectively rendering their  platforms borderline unusable through a series of hostile management decisions gave a lot of people the out they were looking for an excuse to make a clean break, but for a lot of people that was really hard. They kept posting into the void on Twitter like a hobo picking trace scraps of tobacco out of fallen cigarette butts.

The revival of the blogosphere just as we were starting to reach the acceptance phase that Facebook and Twitter were never coming back felt like stepping back into the sun and rubbing our eyes. Even as the child king of Twitter stamped his feet and decreed there was to be no more blog sharing through his platform, closing the doors to outside links, we writers were emboldened. We would find ways to share. The internet belonged to the people.

Then Substack, quickly establishing itself as the leader in the blogosphere resurgence, saw space opening up in a market and unveiled something they’d been working on behind the scenes—they hotwired a bootleg Twitter clone and strapped it to the back of their blogging software. It ran on diesel and had to be cranked by hand to get going, but it worked.

Somewhere, just out of the range of hearing, an old rusted clock began ticking down.

The only image in my stock library for “ominous clock”

Imagine a twin engine Cessna flown by a couple of mob guys running a drug delivery across the border. They hit turbulence and a single large bag of crack cocaine tumbles out. It falls through the atmosphere and lands with a thud in the yard of a rehab facility. That was what happened when Substack launched Notes.

In the beginning it really honestly did feel like a better, more polite version of Twitter for writers. Nobody had shaken the snow globe yet. That was always going to happen eventually. A platform that actively courts the kinds of people who fall afoul of content guidelines on other media sites decided to put them all in the same arena as a bunch of journalists and progressive activists. They decided to raise the safety barriers between Paul Offit and perhaps the largest population of diehard anti-vaccinationists on the internet. They decided to put Matt Taibbi in a room with Popehat. Jesse Singal in a room with anyone. They really thought nothing was going to go sideways here? Just because there’s something special about writers that we’re above these human squabbles?

News flash: We aren’t. Boy howdy we aren’t. But that’s just evidence that the architects of tech platforms fall victim to stereotypes about writers. That we were all just going to sit by the fireplace and work out our differences with quiet contemplative discourse. No sarcasm, no smarm, no pith, just cushioned duelling of passages from Marx and Thoreau.

But your writers were writing, Hamish. You provided the prompt. The storyboard was “the sequel to Twitter.” The beats were being laid down. It was only a matter of time before we started casting the first Main Characters.

The problem with the plan, which nobody seems to have predicted for some reason, was that not everyone was on the platform to write blogs. Overwhelmingly, the number of subscribers I have who have set up a Substack profile don’t blog, themselves. What the co-founders of the platform reckon they were banking on was that nobody on Notes was going to argue tersely or rudely because they would be too busy trying to be nice to attract subscriptions—a theory that makes zero sense on a platform composed mostly of people who aren’t looking for subscriptions or offering anything to subscribe to. Something that people should figure out before establishing a social network is that you’re not a stage director. You can’t run it by simply explaining people’s own motivations to them.

When the great and terrible Nazigate scandal hit, it took about three weeks for Substack Notes to become as bad as Twitter. The feed can be adjusted to only show you people who you subscribe to or follow, but it’s opt-in. By default, it’s platform wide and algorithmic. That’s how the “network effect” works. Another writer you follow posts a note, one of their readers replies to it, you see them, they see you, and you immediately become each other’s poltergeist. They start showing up on your feed too. “Virality” is achieved there in much the same way as it is on Twitter, though a better analogy for Notes might be ripples in a pond—or to bring us full circle, a monkeysphere—pieces with a bigger splash reach more readers. It’s a system that still works okay to keep people roughly within their friendly areas of interest as long as nobody shakes the snow globe.

You have to let the Nazis settle to the bottom.

This is the kind of controversy that would have sputtered out and returned to a smooth cruising altitude by now if algorithms didn’t keep it stuck in a self-nourishing feedback loop. People with very strong opinions about speech and ideology—liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and even some of the Nazis—all got their tails tangled together in a rat king of bickering one-upmanship and couldn’t escape if they wanted to.

And nobody really wanted to. That old Twitter adrenaline was back. But now the main benefit of Notes above Twitter is that you’re actually still allowed to link to Substack articles on Notes.

Earlier this week a Substack writer with a very large platform linked to a piece I wrote over a month ago on his Notes feed and very badly, very angrily, misrepresented its content (it’s unclear that he actually read the piece). His own readers, very much to their credit, mostly opted to read the thing before piling on and noticed that it didn’t say what he claimed, but then there were still a lot of people participating in the old Twitter tradition of taking an aggressive stand against clicking on the link they’re shitting on. Not the best attitude to bring to a writing platform, but great for social media.

Five minutes after writing this he choked on a whole bag of dicks

The number of Polluxes and deimatic sophists I’ve blocked on the platform over the past few weeks is depressing and very far from ideal—blocking people from reading and commenting on my work is literally the opposite of what I want, I leave all my comment sections open to everybody for this reason—but I’m desperately trying to re-train the algorithm. I don’t have much patience for the Twitter snark anymore. But I’m fearful, now—as I grow in readership, I want to help other writers whose work I enjoy find an audience among my readership. I don’t want to pull the ladder up behind me. But if my algorithm—the people who don’t subscribe but got stuck to me sometimes against their will—fills up with people who either hate me or just want to hate me because the hate feels good, then I’m scared of what kind of audience I’m throwing my friends to.

This brings me ultimately to my key point—to the people who have and are fleeing Substack for other platforms (and to anyone else who wants to misrepresent me: I am not planning to leave). Frequently the accusation, levied with some amount of fedora-tipping and tea-sipping, is that the writers who are moving to Bee Ghost or Ghost Hive or whatever it’s called are being hypocritical because there are also Nazis there. But I really, sincerely don’t think that Nazis are the point anymore. I’m not entirely sure they ever were.

I think people are simply seeing the writing on the wall—or the tweets.

Most people who have tried to study and understand the landscape of social media have read and appreciated what is probably the most brilliant and important essay ever written on the topic, Cory Doctorrow’s Social Quitting (you may know it better as “the enshittification essay”). It explores the process through which platforms grow, succeed, buckle, and collapse. A highly predictable process, it turns out.

Unfortunately, a platform starting out by doing something really amazing and really well is only the first warning sign. For all the time I’ve just spent dissing Substack Notes, it has been phenomenal in helping me relaunch my career.

I want to say it plainly: It is unclear to me how I would grow an audience on any other platform. My most popular pieces have a few thousand views between them and have earned me an impressive uptick in subscriptions, and I’m pretty close to certain that not a single one of those readers came from outside the Substack network. Nobody shares on other platforms. There aren’t any platforms to share on. Web 2.0 is not just a bunch of walled gardens anymore, it’s walled fortresses.

The first hundred or so subscribers I got were from Twitter, which then closed its doors to link sharing, especially from this website. I have maybe one dozen subscribers from Facebook, probably fewer. About five from Reddit. I have one single solitary subscriber, remarkably, from LinkedIn. (Hello, I have no idea who you are but thanks for coming on board). There are ways to trickle people in. But the network effects built in to Substack are unmatched.

That’s what’s frightening about it right now. Per Doctorrow:

This enshittification was made possible by high switching costs. The vast communities who’d been brought in by network effects were so valuable that users couldn’t afford to quit, because that would mean giving up on important personal, professional, commercial and romantic ties. And just to make sure that users didn’t sneak away, Facebook aggressively litigated against upstarts that made it possible to stay in touch with your friends without using its services. Twitter consistently whittled away at its API support, neutering it in ways that made it harder and harder to leave Twitter without giving up the value it gave you.

When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left.

Substack is not at this stage, and I am not accusing it of being there, or even necessarily of heading in that direction. I can download my list of subscriber emails and upload you all at some other platform if I wanted to. I’m not losing all my connections in the way that I would be deleting my Twitter or Facebook accounts.

But I think people who are leaving now, before the cost of doing so gets too high, are doing so specifically because they’ve been spooked. With the promise of open borders even in excess of what Elon Musk allows, no content moderation, and the mess that occurred with Substack Notes I think some writers got a big fat wollop of déjà vu. I certainly did. I have absolutely no right to attempt to piggyback on Cory Doctorrow and coin a term as good as enshittification, but it’s difficult for me to resist calling what’s happening here “entwittification.”

One thing is very clear to me: Some kind of social network or networks is going to need to exist for writers and journalists to operate and find audiences and make a living in the internet age. There has to be a way to do this without the experience turning into a toxic sack of misery. There has to be.

Whatever this will look like, I don’t think it’s going to be another Twitter clone. Particularly a naked, unmoderated, free-for-all brawl version of a Twitter clone. Look around at what has become of the rest of Web 2.0—it’s a decaying, atrophying mess. It’s a cake that exploded in the microwave. It’s not working. We don’t want to keep doing this again and again, we need something new.

Maybe the Substack guys can figure it out. I sure hope so, because I’m damn tired of the musical chairs.