![]() Even further, says Craig Mod, a writer who has something like six email newsletters, email allows creators and writers to actually own the connections they have with their audiences instead of leasing them out to Facebook or Twitter: Ownership is the critical point here. There's also the sense of direct connection: when a reader signs up for a newsletter, they are clearly saying they want to get that email. I think this is a huge part of the reason email has become so popular recently.Ĭompared to the highlight-reel of the mainstream, the "non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified" culture of email newsletters is a breath of fresh air. More and more people are beginning to recognize the power of owning a creative business. Personalities like Li Jin, Taylor Lorenz, Joseph Albanese, and Colin and Samir have already begun to carve out their own sort of meta-niches covering the creator economy itself. New creative economies are just beginning to boom: the next wave of creators, artists, and entrepreneurs are already producing, sharing, and monetizing their personal passion, unique experiences, and specific knowledge by going directly to their audiences, fans, and customers. There's more innovation happening on the internet than ever before - it just seems to be happening away from the hugely public mainstream and in more personal spaces. Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom to Kara Swisher after he quit Facebook in 2018 Exploring the forest Social media is in a pre-Newtonian moment, where we all understand that it works, but not how it works. It was 2014 when Facebook officially changed their motto from "move fast and break things" to "move fast with stable infrastructure." The disruptors have become the incumbents, and the new dynamic is all still being figured out. The once-innovative social networks have become lumbering behemoths uninspiring, untrustworthy, and boring. Just this week, Discord allegedly turned-down a $12 billion dollar offer from Microsoft. ![]() Twitter is pushing out its new Spaces product to compete with Clubhouse. ![]() The industry is aware of this, of course: Facebook has television commercials promoting FB Groups encouraging communities based around identities. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on. Strickler writes: Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. Similarly, the ephemerality of stories (which Insta and Twitter shamelessly copied from Snapchat) has filled some of the void for daily sharing - but it's clear that we are still in the early days of understanding the impact of the social networks. Personally, I haven't regularly posted to my personal Instagram page since 2018, but I have DM group-chats I check almost every day. The mainstream is only for the most significant moments - big life-updates, amazing moments, epic vacations. The concept of the mainstream is both new and powerful. In his Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, Kickstarter cofounder Yancey Strickler describes the public internet of the late 2010's and early 2020's as a social battleground of hostile ideas and viral information, a transformation which has shifted discourse towards more private spaces: In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream. It's no surprise that people are becoming less-and-less comfortable with sharing on public social stages and increasingly prefer to spend more-and-more time in private spaces like direct messages, group-chats, and email newsletters. In a poetic twist, the very spur-of-the-moment spontaneity that made Twitter (and Facebook, Instagram, etc.) interesting, even magical, in the first place have made those places. The goal is to never be it- maple cocaine January 3, 2019 Social media isn't good anymoreĮach day on twitter there is one main character. It's an open format, which means that anyone can create their own RSS feeds, apps, or services. Unlike our Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok feeds - impermeable black boxes which are completely controlled by their respective companies - RSS is like email in that it isn't "owned" by any individual company or entity. Last year, after more than a decade of getting my information from social media, I switched back the original newsfeed: RSS.
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