Poisoning The Well

Every online community that I have been part of eventually met the same fate, closure.  There are only two exceptions, the first being Facebook and the second being Twitter.  The former I left around 8 years ago now if I am not mistaken.  The reason why it has persisted so long I believe is due to the fact that it transformed to become something much more than a community, if anything the communal aspects of Facebook were gutted long ago and replaced with a design that is optimised for selling.

Twitter on the other hand I have a complicated relationship with.  At this point I have had over a dozen accounts on Twitter, the latest one has miraculously lasted some 4 and a half years now.  I say miraculous because prior to this the longest any account lasted on Twitter was a year or two at most.  However I would argue that even now the only reason this account has lasted so long is that I don't really "use" twitter anymore, at least, not in the way it was intended.  It was originally intended to encourage engagement but at this point it has devolved more into being something of an open diary where people record their statuses for posterity and react to rolling news.  I can't remember the last time I actually had a conversation with someone on twitter that wasn't in response to something happening in the news or something that was trending at that moment.  Twitter has reached a point where it is an Event driven social network where events drive engagement - no surprise then that there is indeed a feature called Moments that are analogous to this concept.

This shift away from building connections is something that I have seen time and again across online communities.  I am 32 years old and the first time I used the Internet was when I was around 10 years old.  In the 22 years that have passed I have seen many online communities rise and fall and the same pattern emerges every time.  That is, that genuine users get value from the community at first, then it grows, then people from outside that community grow to resent it, they engage with it and slowly poison it until you reach a point where those who wish to abuse the community have such an impact that the value is lost for those that found genuine use for it.  Now this doesn't necessarily imply raw numbers, the trolls that descend on these communities do not have to grow in number at all, they need only ruin the experience for the majority of the users that actually want to use the community.

This process doesn't happen by stealth, it is often very visible and very clear to genuine users what is happening but the one constant that remains is that those who run the platform these communities are hosted on fail to take action to tackle this poison.  Instead it grows, the arguments of free speech are often used in defence by the platform creators, and their favourite mantra is echoed "they haven't actually broken the rules" which make no mistake isn't an attempt to lay down a hypothetical situation in which those people would be removed, no, it's an acknowledgement that they know exactly what they are doing and they are letting it happen anyway.

The end result has always been the same, the genuine users fall away in time and move on to the next platform.  The more successful the community was at its peak the longer this fall can take to happen but it always gets there in the end.  The trolls contribute nothing of value to the community and you eventually reach a point where it becomes worthless both in the figurative sense and also in the financial sense.  The trolls don't provide a genuine user base to capitalise, they don't create meaningful impressions on pages, the advertisements that are often used to support these platforms start to dwindle in terms of the rate they offer and you eventually reach the point where the platform disappears entirely because it can no longer be supported financially.

Twitter famously ran at a loss for several years before it turned a profit to begin with but even now its financials are not stable.  It continues to provide its service only because some people still see value in it and choose to invest.  The platform is effectively subsidised.  The problem with this business model as stated above ultimately comes down to value, in this case the perceived value.  As a user, the value of twitter continues to fall.  With updates and features introduced that the user-base has been abundantly clear they do not want, and the continued ignorance and refusal to provide features they do want both demonstrate the same fundamental problem exists - those that run the platform are not listening to those that use it.  More than this, 2020 has demonstrated perhaps better than any other year in recent history that there is a problem with platforms continuing to provide service to trolls and those who poison the well.  At some point you have to realise you're drinking the water too and if you turn a blind eye to the poison it's going to get you too in the end.