It’s always telling when the dude who literally founded your social network doesn’t use it for nearly two months.
Noam Bardin, the founder of Post.News, the site that was intended to bring back the news-friendly vibes of Twitter, posted less than a thousand times on his own service over the span of about a year and a half, and not at all in March. There may be arguments about quality over quantity, but it is not reassuring when the guy who’s trying to convince you that his social network is the right choice is barely even using it, not even to repost his network’s own content.
I think the problem with any social network or service is the importance of seeing the person in charge of that tool use it. So yeah, a lack of dogfooding is a big sign.
But seeing Post, the first of the new generation of social networks to launch amid the Twitter explosion of 2022, falter so soon after its creation highlights that many of the observations many people made about the network—that its centralized nature, its venture-backed funding, and its emphasis on micropayments—would eventually doom the platform.
It’s not that I didn’t want to see a news-centric social network succeed. The problem is, it didn’t fit the time in which it was born. We were asking bigger questions about our social networks in response to what happened with Elon and Twitter, and it didn’t feel like Post, with a vibe I’d describe as Twitter-meets-early-Quora, gave particularly satisfactory answers.
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That’s not to say that Post, or something like it, didn’t have value. But I think that it felt to users like what it was—a network intended to be something else, retrofitted to the moment, and try as it might, not really meeting it. As Bardin wrote in his announcement:
We have done many great things together. We built a toxicity-free community, a platform where Publishers engage, and an app that validated many theories around Micropayments and consumers’ willingness to purchase individual articles. We even managed to cultivate a phenomenal tipping ecosystem for creators and commenters.
But, at the end of the day, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform. A consumer business, at its core, needs to show rapid consumer adoption and we have not managed to find the right product combination to make it happen.
In a lot of ways, Post was designed to recreate the vibes of newsy Twitter based on the people it attracted and how they used it, but with a more positive environment. But the thing is, we expect more out of our Twitter replacements.
I think in a way, the early conversations we saw about Post, where users and observers raised questions about things like its funding, its development strategy, and its long-term plans showed that users took the right lessons from the demise of Twitter. That’s not to say that Bardin and his team were bad at what they did. But the structural weaknesses of Post, which couldn’t be forgiven for scale, like they could on Threads, meant that even if their intentions were pure, there was always a chance it could turn out to be a bad bet for the end user.
Beyond the still-antiseptic Threads, many users have found homes on networks like Bluesky or Mastodon, both of which I recommend if you’re not using them. Spoutible, which did not get the wave of attention that Post did but also didn’t take VC money, is another network in the mix, one that has at times drawn attention for its ability to talk the talk.
I joined Spoutible while writing this because I realized I hadn’t!
“The next Twitter will not emerge through hype. We often forget why Twitter became Twitter in the first place,” founder Chrisopher Bouzy wrote in a thread last year. (Bouzy very much is good at dogfooding his own network, by the way.) “For any platform to endure, it must first establish a foundation of devoted users and grow organically. The platform's culture ultimately determines its destiny.”
However, it suffered a tough setback earlier this year after a major security incident was exposed, followed by some poor handling of said incident.
All of this is to say, 18 months since Elon’s purchase of Twitter, we still haven’t decided which network is for us. Most are on Threads, but Threads’ weird desire to be Twitter but not Twitter is leading to much frustration.
Recently, Ryan Grim, the DC Bureau Chief of The Intercept, made a case for users to go back to Twitter over on Threads, which folks immediately shot down.
As pal of Tedium Jesse Baer put it: “Sorry man, it's X now. Twitter is dead, and we should be looking to the future about how we build more resilient platforms and networks, not hiding in nostalgia.”
If we’re going to find a way forward through the morass of this social media reset, we’re going to have to stop looking through the lens of the past. I know, it’s pretty funny that I, of all people, am the one saying that.
Post-Links
The Computer History Museum has a great feature on Gary Kildall, one of the most important figures in the history of computing—albeit one who did not benefit from the PC revolution despite inventing much of its technology.
I am very skeptical of secondary AI devices being at all good, but I think if they have a shot, clips like this one of Rabbit’s founder Jesse Lyu essentially testing his Rabbit R1 against the Humane AI Pin in a lightweight, unedited format will be the gold standard as we all figure this out. I encourage people who aren’t involved in making either of these devices to do a video like this, and intentionally make it with zero edits so we can judge the tech objectively.
The actors in The Blair Witch Project never got the financial or creative support they deserved for their work. Now, as the film series once again gets rebooted, they’re using the opportunity to point out they didn’t have union representation.
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