Do you remember forums? I do.
Around the year 2000, I joined a forum for a webcomic about God and the universe, where God was a cute little girl and the universe was a goblin-lookin' thing named Irving who accidentally ate her. There weren't many webcomics back then, but more importantly, there weren't many ways of meeting internet strangers back then (not ones I felt were safe to pursue as an 18-year-old girl, anyway). AOL chat rooms and instant messaging random people was my world before the AR forum, and the tight-knit nature of writing and responding to a small group of people increased my love of the internet a hundred fold.
Since then, so many things gained popularity. I made a LiveJournal in 2002, a deviantArt account in 2004. And while I met a few new friends-of-friends on those, it was mostly keeping up with the core people I met in the AR forum or from high school. I was never the cracker-jack blogger or artist that made compelling pieces and built a big audience. I just went about my life, doodled a bit, and talked about it sometimes, and people responded.
So I can't say Facebook didn't support what I was already doing when I eventually made my account there in 2008, but the more I participated, the more I didn't like a few things about the new face of social media:
- How it discourages lengthy posts. Some places did it quite deliberately by limiting your characters, but others just encouraged you to add hundreds and hundreds of acquaintances, such that if you wanted to catch up on everyone's activities, you really had to tl;dr the ones that took too much time.
- How it encourages resharing of someone else's content instead of writing your own. Why write your own post when you can reblog to someone else and say "what she said!" And even when that tells me what you like, I don't know why you like it.
- How it limits back-and-forth discussion. Some of this is tied to the length of post or stupid controls (I'm looking at you, Tumblr), but it's mostly caused by things floating off your radar within a day, if not sooner.
- How much it draws people's time and attention away from the really amazing communities.
This last one is key. The greatest communities I've seen formed not by a mass gathering of people who already know each other, but by a small gathering of strangers with a common enthusiasm for a writer, blogger, webcomic, storyteller, artist or creative project. Comment sections can be nice, but again, when an update is made, it curtails the discussion in a way that feels inorganic.
Which returns me to the forum experience I stumbled upon in 2002, and when I joined Sarah Ellerton's Seraph-Inn forum in 2009 (which had its roots in her first webcomic in 2004). But in a world of people who've been trained to accept that social media is something you do from your smartphone, and who are (understandably) loathe to make yet another account somewhere? I just wonder if it's still possible to build one today.