The Future of Social Media is Old School
February 8, 2018
Before social media, the only way to express yourself online was via a mostly anonymous series of blogs and sites that were impossible to go viral because virality didn’t exist. Oddly, some bright minds are going back to this method with txt.fyi, a platform where you can post anything you want without it going to search engines. This old-fashioned message board was examined in a recent Wired article, “This Stripped-Down Blogging Tool Exemplifies Antisocial Media.”
I wanted something where people could publish their thoughts without any false game of social manipulation, one-upmanship, and favor-trading,” he says. This is what I found so interesting about his creation. Its antivirality doesn’t necessarily prevent a post from becoming wildly popular. (A txt.fyi URL shared on, say, Facebook could perhaps go viral.) But its design favors messages to someone, not everyone.
[The inventor] discovered someone using txt.fyi to write letters to a deceased relative. It was touching and weirdly human, precisely the sort of unconventional expression we used to see a lot more of online. But today we sand down those rough edges, those barbaric yawps, in the quest for social spread. Even if you don’t want to share something, Medium or Tumblr or Snapchat tries to make you. They have the will to virality baked in.
This is a neat idea and might have a longer shelf life than you’d think. That’s because we are firm believers that every good idea on the internet gets retooled for awfulness. (Reddit, anyone?) This quasi-dark web blogging approach is almost certain to be used for nefarious purposes and will become a tool for hate speech and crime.
Patrick Roland, February 8, 2018
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