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Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] writes:

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Time: 2018-01-01 08:44:15 UTC

Original URL: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/28/16795090/internet-community-2017-post-mortem-tumblr-amino-drip-tinyletter [theverge.com] using utf-8 encoding.

Title: Tiny, Weird Online Communities Made A Comeback In 2017

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Tiny, Weird Online Communities Made A Comeback In 2017

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story [theverge.com]:

Americans got tired of big social media in 2017. Or at least, we stopped wanting to look at it, and we stopped pretending to like it.

This feels true to me as someone who uses the internet every day, but I also know it’s true because when The Verge partnered with Reticle Research to conduct a representative survey [theverge.com] of Americans’ attitudes towards tech’s biggest power players, 15.4 percent of Facebook users said they “greatly” or “somewhat” disliked using the product, while 17 percent of Twitter users said the same. That made them the most disliked of the six companies in question, which also included Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. More than 10 percent of respondents described Facebook’s effect on society as “very negative,” and 10.5 percent said the same about Twitter — in both cases a higher number than the other four companies combined.

The survey doesn’t reveal why Americans feel the way they do, but last December, writing about the impulse to call 2016 “the worst year ever,” The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino [newyorker.com] articulated a pretty good guess as to why spending your time on the web’s massive, news-saturated platforms might feel so bad: “There is no limit to the amount of misfortune a person can take in via the internet,” she says. 2016 couldn’t possibly be the worst year in history, Tolentino decided, but it was the year that convinced her the promise of the social media had been false, and that “the internet would only ever induce the sense of powerlessness that comes when the sphere of what a person can influence remains static, while the sphere of what can influence us seems to expand without limit, allowing no respite at all.”

The mainstream social internet is so big; everyone is connected to everyone, over a billion on Facebook alone. The consequences of connection — fake news, radicalization, massive targeted harassment campaigns, algorithmically-generated psychological torment [theverge.com], inane bullshit — were not part of what we were sold. We don’t really have the option of moving our lives off of the internet, and coordinated boycotts [theverge.com] of our monstrous platforms have been brief and mostly [theverge.com] fruitless.But many of us found ways to renegotiate the terms of how we spent our time online. Rather than the enormous platforms that couldn’t decide if, let alone how they had contributed to the election of a deranged narcissist or the rise of the virulently racist alt-right or a pending nuclear holocaust, why not something smaller, safer, more immediately useful?

The old promise of the internet — niche communities, human connection, people exchanging ideas, maybe even paying each other for the work they’d made — never really lost its appeal, but this year it came back with a miniature vengeance.

We can see this longing for community — and specifically, the sort of small, weird communities that populated and defined the early internet — everywhere. There’s Amino, the Tumblr-inspired app [forbes.com] that lets fandoms build online spaces that are essentially club houses, then coordinate the creation of elaborate works of fan art, fiction, cosplay, and fandom lore. At the request of its largely teenage audience, the platform released its first cosplay yearbook [aminoapps.com] this December, and doled out honors to the best writing, photography, and tutorials around cosplay. The thousands of fandom-specific rooms are lively and strange, each with their own moderators and byzantine rules.

And there’s the kids who are bending major platforms to their will, having their fun on Instagram but circumventing the intended use by making “finstagrams,” [dailydot.com] separate, strange accounts that aren’t tied to the Facebook social graph and therefore let users post weirder, funnier content they wouldn’t share to everyone they know.

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