Substack now is it?

First post again. New social media account. Another concern I will drop off in a week or two. OR WILL I?Yes probably. Who knows, I can imagine this specific post never seeing the light of day. But the intention is there. Let’s explain.Imagine the world in 2004. It was a time when social networks didn’t exist as a concept. The internet was brimming with bloggers, and successful ones at that. It was a wild west of people driven to diary their lives, or post about their subject interest, and just shoot off their thoughts into the ether. And they had nowhere to share them… except, you know, in life. Word of mouth.

Then, Facebook popped its shitty little head out into the world. I remember it being rolled out while first at University. The year was 2005. Friends in higher reputation university’s (Cambridge, Oxford, Durham) were being permitted access in the rollout, but it was coming to us soon… you’d need a specific e-mail domain to join it. And then you did, and… all hell broke loose.

Everyone I knew was on there - classmates, friends, former flames, current flames, a lot of flames… but more than that, I was friends with pretend celebrities, alter egos, even superheroes… I may even have been a superhero briefly. Possibly? One of my friends was a literal fruit.¹ I think for a short while, I was the owner of the Curb Your Enthusiasm fan page, simply by virtue of the fact that no one had made one yet. I hadn’t even seen much of it at that point - even back then there were a few seasons in the can - but it was just a bit of a laugh. On DVD. Which we had delivered by post. And then watched on our laptop while the effing thing whizzed loudly in the background.

When you went out for a night out, someone would bring a little pocket camera they had gotten for Christmas or a birthday, and they’d take dimly lit photos, trails of light from less than ideal exposure conditions, eyes red from the flash and post them the next day; like wolves, we’d delve into the heap, feasting on illicit photos of friends snogging strangers, tagging friends of friends, untagging enemies of friends, commenting with great delight about what a great night we had in a completely anonymous and unspectacular club night we attended because it was a Tuesday and Tuesdays are the night of the week we got drunk, just like every other night of the week.

Oh, and did I mention the laptop we used would have to be connected with a LAN cable into the network. This all sounds like the 1950s. I can hear my spine creaking now, while my hairline retreats desperately away from my forehead out of sheer embarrassment.²

Poking, christ. What was that about? Was it sexual? I definitely got some pity pokes in my time.³ There was even a time you could pay for specific emoticons that you could gift to people. Did I put money into that thing? I hope not. I think I did. What a gift.⁴

A few years later, I read a job description for Innocent smoothies (very new thing back then) about twitter influencers. You needed experience with twitter though. Twitter? WTF was it? “Microblogging site” said a more technically knowledgeable friend. We both applied, (and I think he got paid because he’d had a whole 3 weeks of experience on the bloody thing). But I joined and my eyes were opened…

Back then of course, you could tweet 140 characters direct to Stephen Fry and he’d personally nob you off. You HAD to follow anyone, and on a friday you should use the hashtag “#followfriday” and recommend people for other people to follow. And it felt like everyone on the site was worth following

For sure, twitter was much less… sexy than facebook. Facebook had the frisson on meeting people, making connections that might one day become something else… twitter was about hearing interesting thoughts from interesting people! It was meritocratic too - people would rise to the top, held aloft by a throbbing heap of followers beneath them, surfing a crowd of fellow travellers to be presented for all to see for their brilliance.

Obviously, Twitter has fallen. Kinda. It’s still a great space, and I think probably the closest aligned with my sensibilities (not the fascist stuff you understand). The medium is simple - short ideas, snappy writing, cast into the world and very easily shareable. It doesn’t force you to post to a recipe, like Instagram, or only limit your visibility to those you are more closely aligned with a la Facebook. You can still do great and interesting things with Twitter, even though it is slowly becoming more long form, and it still offers what you have to say to a great ocean of users.But of course, that bloody algorithm (see Algorythm had to get involved. The cursed monkey needed a way to insert promoted content, find a way to pay the bills. And so you were no longer guaranteed to have your content seen by the eyes that had once chosen to see your stuff (and that’s if they are even there any more).

So what’s the plan? I have content. There’s a folder in my notion app, with subfolders full of scraps. With the potential to be good, funny content. I could die in 100 years, and still not have the chance to really push out all the shit I have put out of my head onto a digital notepad. I even have other notation apps. But it very rarely gets off the page, or probably more importantly, rarely gets onto a page. I have so many notes for ideas and stories that need to be, er, plundered. Not even Commercialised, just published and shared.

But I need to take a long term vision on this stuff. I have to plant the seeds somewhere. Water it regularly. Let it grow. And then, after some actual endeavour maybe there will be some fruit.

We’ll see. Well, it’s up to you I suppose…

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