tldr: Nope, it’s actually harder to do on big social platforms. Here’s why.
Here’s a short reply I had to a message from a good friend on the role social media—specifically twitter—played in us meeting and becoming friends. He was gracious enough to let me respond.
“I mean, look at us–It took a big network like Twitter for our paths to cross, and ditto for a tons of baseball friends, national park friends, etc”
– one of the friends I met via Twitter’s #parkchat
Oh, I don’t at all believe that we needed a big network like twitter to meet! I believe the opposite is true, actually.
Sure, we happened to find each other there, but twitter didn’t enable it in some unique or special way. I mean, the web was already a very social place before twitter, and for the same reasons Twitter took off, there’s every reason to believe that the rest of the social internet would have continued to absolutely blow up too.
Even if twitter (or other large centralized social media) never existed, our meeting was just as likely to have happened somewhere in 100 other online communities–perhaps on the extremely active comments section of some road trip blog to a web forum on national parks or an online club organized on whatever replaced Yahoo Groups, or a photo-sharing site like flickr, or a mailing list of travel questers, or on any of the myriad other social networks that existed or would have existed, if not for twitter. Don’t forget the hundreds of competing sites that the big platforms acquired simply as a way to kill off any possible competitors. I’ve made friends on basically all of those types of communities.
On net, I think centralized social media platforms like twitter actually collapsed opportunities to connect with people with similar interests online, not enhanced them. (I think they had a lot of other negative effects we’re just now realizing too, but won’t comment on that here)
We first connected via parkchat, right? Well, that was like 25 people tweeting at each other 10 years ago…in an absolute sea of tweets. Very little signal compared to the firehose of noise. You essentially accidentally stumbled into a conversation there. A big network is also a big haystack in which to sift through looking for your needle. After all, what infinitesimal percentage of tweets are about national parks? We were damn lucky for our rowboats to bump into each other in such a vast ocean.
Let’s say you moved to metro LA and needed to make some new friends. Would you just stand on the street corner (the “big network” of 13 million residents) and wait to find someone in a Giants hat walk past that you could talk to? Nah, you’d go to the NY Giants fan club (the small network of 1300 members) instead, because of course it would be more likely to make new friends there.
Similarly, outside of twitter, there were plenty of other online communities of national park folks out there that we could have met on. And there probably would have been even more of them if no big networks emerged. Smaller ones, certainly, but like the fan club example, it’s easier for boats to bump into each other in a lake than in the ocean. I stumbled upon the National Park Travelers Club—essentially a 10x larger and more dedicated version of parkchat—before twitter even existed. I met several park friends there (some that I later brought to parkchat!), and they were doing several times a year “tweetups” before twitter existed. Anyway, it wasn’t super hard to find groups like this, you either just googled it, ran across a blog mention (twitter mostly replaced personal blogging), or ran across it organically somewhere else…just as we did with parkchat. And if people hadn’t defaulted to big platforms like twitter, each of those communities would have had a much more vibrant community that they ran themselves…just like every social club has for hundreds of years now!
But, hey, I liked twitter and enjoyed parkchat for a long time and made some quality friends from it—no doubt about it! But just because we got 50 parkchat friends from twitter doesn’t mean it was actually the best platform on which to make park friends. I also invested a lot of time into twitter–which is itself an opportunity cost. Had I not spent many years interacting constantly with a smallish group of (I dunno maybe 250 max?) parkchat folks and instead invested that same effort into interacting with the 2500 park questers in the NPTC, what might that have looked like? Might I have 10x more park friends right now? What might it look like now if I had invested 1/6 of the time on twitter and spent the rest in five other communities of parkchat-like folks? It’s almost certainly higher ROI for creating friendships in those other topic-specific communities because you’re not wasting time sifting through unrelated stuff, like ads or posts on every other possible topic.
Our instagram feeds these days are a good example of that. Users are currently served 1 ad after every 4th post in the timeline. So you’re spending 20% (1/5) of the time you scroll looking at ads and not the posts of your friends or might-become-friends. That’s a helluva lot of overhead. You wouldn’t watch TV if there was a minute long commercial break for every 4 minutes of your show. But we accept it on social media. Not because it’s a rational decision necessarily (I’m sure you don’t think scrolling IG is the best way to find new luggage), but because we first became invested in the ad-free versions and then (because of inertia, network effects, switching costs, collective action problem, etc) just accepted the ensuing platform rot as a necessary cost. (Side note: 75% of my IG ads right now are for a “buy once, use forever” style razor…that I already bought a year ago. These ad platforms have gotten much worse for businesses too; and as consumers, we’ve helped trap them into an increasingly bad business model.)
We’ve all been down this road before, of course. The early internet’s twitter and instagram were AOL and Prodigy. It seemed downright amazing that we could make friends online and so we readily accepted the ads and walled garden as a worthwhile cost for that. But luckily some nerds thought “wait a minute, couldn’t we make this soooo much better??” and developed protocols like html, http, url, and web browsers. And suddenly we had the Cambrian explosion of the World Wide Web. And then we all quickly abandoned the old narrative that AOL was important and worthwhile and realized how incredibly dumb and limiting it was to think that the service was peak internet that we should just accept as-is—that we should only be able to email people who were also paying for AOL and not everyone on the whole planet. I think we’re at that same point in time with social media and hope we can get over the hump like we did back then.
Anyway, thanks for letting me push back a little; feel free to tell me where I got something wrong. I know I’m pretty ornery on this topic these days. You know that I really do love connecting with people online—it truly is amazing—and I’m probably the only person you know that has an actual form on my website for “people I know online” to add themselves to my road trip itineraries. But we all deserve some better solutions and have all the tools we need to make something better. So that’s what I’m trying to do.