SOURCE - https://brightwanderer.tumblr.com/post/681806049845608448
Alt-text:
I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.
Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.
The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.
| just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.
Reminds me of last week when everyone was talking about how Bluesky is worthless because it’s just going to go the way of Twitter. And I’m like, Twitter was a good thing for like 15 years.
If Bluesky follows that same pattern, great.
I feel like the concern with Bluesky is that Bluesky could enshitify much faster than Twitter, in part because market conditions push for a faster path to profitablity.
Yeah, I won’t claim Twitter was great, but it was widely considered too good (to its users) to be profitable. That was possible during that early investor optimism when the internet was still new, but I also don’t see that happening now anymore.
A social media platform needs to decouple from the typical company structure and democratize its improvement, otherwise investors will necessarily make it as bad as they can without immediately losing all users.
See, I was going to say that Twitter was a bad thing for 15 years.
But then it was just stupid, it wasn’t a Nazi bar like today.
Peter Thiel, the Adelsons, the Mercers, and the rest of the Trump crowd were sponsoring reactionary fascist content on the site long before Elon bought it.
Twitter was equal opportunity - willing to take money from all the highest bidders to promote any kind of commercialized content - prior to the buyout. But plenty of that content was fascist af.
I don’t like the pattern of having to pay a search cost, then finally getting everything set up, and then they gradually enshittify until the process repeats. I’d rather just have stable infrastructure, like email.
Twitter was never a good thing, AND I was never a Twitter user so i can actually say that.
like it actually did permanent damage to our culture