Once upon a time, in its early days, Twitter was described as the "ambient Internet." Forums were a crowded social space—the closest mid-00s Internet came to the Internet as we know it now. Blogs were for focused, measured discussion. Twitter, by contrast, was a peaceful place: a place where you could marinate in the faint, comfortable presence of other people. The "like" was invented, not to engineer competition between users, but to give them a way of quietly, gently sharing companionship with other people.

It's funny in retrospect, right? Imagine likes being used to promote calm, warmth, and togetherness. But that was the idea. 

If I remember the timeline correctly, Tumblr was the first site to implement them—and early Tumblr was sometimes referred to as a kind of Zen garden, a place of cultivating little snapshots of your day and your mind. It was meant to be personal, the same way that blogging was, but in a way that felt more like a living scrapbook, a collage of your life, with a feed that would let you and your friends form a tapestry of the world you were living in together. Tumblr also pioneered the "reblog," which was meant to further that sense of weaving together a shared tapestry. (It was also, for me, the site where I first saw that Zen garden mentality washed away in a tide of memes and attention-seeking competition, but we'll slowly tease our way there.)

Let's keep following this trend, shall we? When Instagram first launched, it took off as an even more extreme version of Twitter's ambient Internet: you could only share photos you snapped from the Instagram app, you couldn't add commentary, and your feed was a silent stream of your friends' lives. I forget whether you were even allowed to post selfies: if I recall correctly, Instagram wouldn't let you snap pictures from your front-facing camera, which was brand-new at the time. (It launched only a month after the release of the iPhone 4, which was the first smartphone with a selfie cam.)

Of course, early inklings of the Internet as we know it today did exist. The first mainstream "algorithm-generated content" site*, Digg, worked more-or-less the same way that Reddit does today. But Digg wasn't fragmented the way that Reddit was: every user saw the same page with the same posts on it, and very few posts made it to Digg's front page on any given day. That was the community appeal: that, every day you visited, you and every other user saw the same crowd-curated set of stories, discovering interesting and unusual and attention-grabbing things online but discovering them together. (The front page of Digg was chronological: if a post became popular enough, it percolated to the top of the page, and slowly fell as new posts succeeded. Reddit, by contrast, was the first site whose content was purely algorithmically ranked, rising and falling at its own chaotic rhythms.)

It's fitting that the real harbinger of the dark times to come was Facebook, which incorporated its competitors' ideas in particularly exploitative ways. Facebook combined the central appeal of MySpace—getting to stalk your classmates—with the feed-driven innovations of Twitter, the liking and resharing mechanics of Tumblr, and eventually the algorithm-fueled "content optimization" of Digg and Reddit. (It didn't bother to steal from Instagram: it simply bought it, then turned it into Facebook.)

Each of these technical innovations was compelling on its own, enough to drive enthusiasts and create a sense of community; each of these was gentle enough on its own, however, that some sense of calm still pervaded. Yes, there was some bickering; yes, there was drama; and yes, there was always some amount of competition for attention, by people who realized that these sites had large enough audience that promoting yourself through them could make you quite successful. But it was only when these sites' various innovations started mingling, their various addictive properties combined to maximize user engagement, that social media turned into the hideous slurry it's now become.
 

Combine these early pioneers, and you get social media as we now understand it—and the world in which every social network is more-or-less the same as every other social network. They all have feeds; they all have likes; they're all driven by either images or videos; they're all algorithm-driven. The only "innovation" we've seen since then, by and large, has come from social media sites figuring out how they can cut out as much of everything else as possible, to focus only on the addictive bits. (Case in point: TikTok, whose algorithm doesn't require you to hit a single Like button to start feeding you new content, and whose "feed" doesn't bother with chronology or linearity and simply shoves new things in your face nonstop.)

It's not particularly interesting to dwell on what these sites have become, since we all know too well what social media is like nowadays. The interesting thing here, to me, is what these sites have turned us into: to compare and contrast what people were like, and what communities were like, in the early days of social media, and what we've become instead today, and why the one turned into the other.

Twitter's ambient space-sharing turned into claustrophobic context collapse. Every one of us is standing right next to everybody else, only now there are no guardrails, no text-only mediums, no 140-character limits to keep our voices tastefully quiet. There's nothing "ambient" about the modern Internet: that's been replaced by the constant shout of doomscrolling, as all our voices are amplified into a cacophony, and we perceive one another in such loud and distorted ways that it becomes impossible to see each other clearly.

Tumblr's Zen-garden scrapbooking was replaced with the sheer depersonalization of content. Everything became a meme, which is to say that everything got distilled down to its simplest and crudest and most parseable form, and we began sharing the things that amused or distracted or diverted us the most, rather than the things that genuinely held our attention. Social media stopped being "about" us, even when it was ostensibly about us, because it reduced us to memes too, and convinced us to think of our identities as a kind of brand, and taught us that there was no room for any more of ourselves than just this.

Instagram replaced the intimate constraints of the iPhone camera with the vacuous emptiness of the "image:" any image, of any kind, uploaded from anywhere. The appeal of the image as a medium was, you could fit the whole thing onto a single screen. Nothing bigger than a phone screen was worth sharing anymore—even as, conversely, the "phone" part of the experience stopped mattering. What mattered, on early Instagram, was that you were sharing the world as seen from the tiny device in your pocket; what mattered later was that nothing bigger than the thing in your pocket was worth experiencing anymore.

When Digg was replaced by Reddit, the notion of there being any kind of editorial vision behind the algorithm vanished altogether. Whereas, on Digg, there was a running question of what kind of post felt particularly Digg-y—along with a sense that some kinds of content weren't worth sharing—Reddit outsourced editorial responsibility to the topical subreddit, then aggregated content from those subreddits without prejudice. Cat photos, webcomics, and libertarianism all got equal room on the front page... and so did pedophilia, until an exposé forced Reddit to finally take action. The alt-right got its start there, because there was nothing stopping it from demanding attention. This was, and is, the Internet's only notion of democratization: to let any grift, any hustle, any idea, propagate as far and as wide as it possibly can. We shouldn't ask ourselves why we're consuming what we're consuming: the algorithm speaks for the people, and the people speak for us, and who remembers a world where anything was curated anyway?

And in Facebook, we witnessed the true death march of a culture that has resigned itself to this. Journalistic institutions committed suicide en masse because Facebook convinced them that video was more profitable than print, wrongly. The drive to catch the most eyeballs turned into a relentless pursuit of outrage, controversy, hostility, conspiracy, all while pandering to the lowest common denominator, reinforcing the easiest and ugliest prejudices in the name of optimization.

In other words, we have evolved the same way that social media itself has evolved. Our personal behaviors mimic the behaviors of our apps themselves. There's no mystery to how we got here: look at how Facebook and Reddit and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube design their products, and you'll see how we ourselves are driven to behave. We center our lives around programs that are ruthlessly optimized to turn us into addicts, and we learn to make addicts out of one another, forsaking ourselves just as ruthlessly in our attempts to manipulate and exploit. We are taught to pursue an end goal that's just as meaningless as the end goal of all these social networks: to win a game whose only reward is "engagement," and whose validation only matters within the confines of the system itself.

It is popular, these days, to view the Internet as some sort of horrible mistake: to believe that it brought out the worst versions of ourselves, and eradicated our attention spans, our ability to discern truth, our willingness to empathize with one another. But I think the moral of social media is much simpler: that we are shaped by the tools we use, and that we will unintentionally grow to reflect them. That's a dire takeaway when the tools you use are atrocious and hateful, but they don't have to be. Once upon a time, social media was kinder, quieter, more intimate, and more wondrous—and those sites were so successful that they're still the apps we use today. Their transition from joyful space to horror show was not inevitable; neither was our evolution, as we clung to them. We allowed this to happen to us, as they made the choice to transform. And now we have the opportunity, and the duty, to ask ourselves what we want our world to look like going forward.

We look at the past, not just to understand the present, but to ask ourselves what the future might be. If we look again at what social media once was, we might learn a thing or two about the many possibilities that remain open to us still.

For a start, we see that you don't need a dozen different addictive gimmicks to create a compelling social experience. People just want to have a little fun. You shouldn't bore them, but you don't need to addict them, either. Entertain them, interest them, give them something a little unusual to do, and they'll be plenty happy. No, they won't use your app for twelve hours a day every day... but then, why would you want them to?

Here's another takeaway: people like when you give them an evocative sense of community. Twitter's early ambience, Instagram's silent intimacy, Digg's collective sense of discovery... all these things mattered, not because of what they let us share personally, but because of what they let us share in communally. They spoke to our need, not to be "connected," but to be together. We still yearn for that. We've just lost the spaces that let us have that—and nobody's thought to build new ones. Even the most well-intended efforts (like Cohost, Mastodon, or Bluesky) just blindly replicate social media from an era past the point where social media went wrong. Nobody attempts the early, strange magic, because we've collectively replaced our memory of it.

Know what people also yearn for? Creative, fun ways to express ourselves. The key word there: express. Tumblr's scrapbook-style curation of our little experiences and joys. Instagram's groundbreaking filters, which let even the worst photographer throw together something that felt stylish. Hell, look at Vine, TikTok's better and more wholesome predecessor: giving people only six seconds to shoot a video seriously lowered the barrier-to-entry for folks who'd never shot a video in their lives, while also giving people room to explore just what you could capture in such a short stretch of time. We like getting to share ourselves. And that sharing is only meaningful when we're not trying to optimize it for a crowd: it is inherently repressive, and inherently antithetical to self-expression, to be told that all that matters about our "content" is how many eyeballs it receives.

That's a lesson we all need to learn, too: addiction constrains. The mechanics of early social media brought us joy, because they were just stimulating enough to keep us playing around together; as they evolved, as they interpolated, they bled away everything but our need to continually optimize ourselves for our perceived audience. The red notification bubble; the marker that shows how many people have liked every post and comment we see; the feed that never stops updating; the content-recommendation formula that tries to keep us clicking... each of these creates a pressure, a compulsion, that slowly drains away anything that exists beyond their confines. The psychological "rewards" that we offer people are motivational when used sparingly; use them more-than-sparingly, however, and they become a form of entrapment.

But maybe the biggest takeaway of all here is: design is an intentional choice, and so is participation. There is nothing "inevitable" about social media: the sites which we resent and despise were once better than they are now, and got worse because they made mindless and venal choices, emulating one another without any clear purpose in mind beyond exploitation. They don't need to be what they have become... and we don't have to be trapped by them, either. Our participation is a choice—and it's a choice that guarantees we'll come to resemble them, more than we might care to admit. 

We can choose to leave; we can also choose to make something better than this. More to the point, we can and should choose both: we should pull back from the places that addict us and use up our time, at least enough that we can work towards making something better. And the more we create better alternatives, the easier it will be to leave the terrible places we've been stranded. Let's remember what the Internet can be, and what it can let us become. We can start by asking ourselves who we want to be, and who social media seems to keep us from becoming, and how we might create social media that brings out the best versions of ourselves instead.

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* Yes, Slashdot existed before Digg. But Slashdot never had the general-audience appeal that Digg did. It was explicitly a site by nerds and for nerds; Digg was mostly frequented by nerds too, sure, but its interface was far more accessible, and anticipated the kinds of mainstream appeal that Reddit finally managed to find.