Stop talking to each other and start buying things: Three decades of survival in the desert of social media

Starts out really ranty, but settles down (slightly) later on. Here's a few parts I particularly enjoyed:

It’s all new and we have to figure it out. To agitate and legislate and be constantly vigilant. Maybe it’ll all seem so obvious and settled in 50 years, but those are our 50 years and no one else is going to have to be the first to have these conversations and try to make policy out of them. That’s us, it’s our lot, and it sucks ass, but this technology is the singularity we geeks have been talking about, and it turns out it’s not just impossible to imagine life on the other side of it before it happens, but it’s really fucking hard to figure out life on the other side of it once you get there, too. This is our actual Oregon Trail. We have to walk it on foot. We have to be the ones who fuck up and we have to be the ones who fix it. We have to be the ones who learn the lessons the hard way and write it all down so someday people get to just hop in a plane and sleep for five hours rather than die in the snow wrapped around our shivering children, praying for a dawn that is far too distant to help us now.

And we’ve seen very clearly this year that even progress that seems obvious and settled 50 years down the track is always vulnerable to people who confuse the ignorance of their own childhoods with the absence of societal problems.

(emphasis mine)

Dang that was a fantastic read. I'm around the same age and that sums up my feelings towards the matter of social media pretty nicely. Putting effort into building communities only to have them crumble out from underneath you because the platform itself becomes unstable... over and over. It gets exasperating and tiring. There are quite a few people I have known who have helped shaped my life that I will likely never hear from again because it's hard to stay in touch with every single leaf that has been scattered to the wind.

This wouldn’t be a problem if people stopped relying on commercial services to build their communities on. There has always been a socially-owned, nonprofit, and open source option. I have always advocated for their use but this is something that nobody ever listens to me about. I’d tell people to forget their AIM and ICQ accounts and join me at Jabber. Hey, it even works with Google Talk now! While my AIM and Yahoo Messenger and MSN messenger accounts are all long gone, the last time I checked my original Jabber.org account still worked.

And the thing is that these community-run communities have the tendency to stick around. Diaryland, whatever that is, is still here. The WELL is still here and it predates the internet. The community of Megazeux users still exists in spite of the author abandoning that program decades ago.

What’s even crazier is that even the most right-wing friendly communities never get taken over by them. That’s because they actually enforce a set of sane community standards that punishes people who publish harmful things.

One thing they do tend to have in common though is that they are community funded. So here’s an unsubtle reminder to make a donation to tildes.

The author makes a big deal out what we'd now call a "click-bait" headline for a newspaper article about Prodigy. They claim they've thought about this article weekly. Did they bother to figure out which newspaper it was and maybe find the original article? Or learn about what Prodigy's business was, and what happened to it? Apparently not. It's a disappointing but sadly typical lack of curiosity.

Like, all that matters is what they thought about it as a kid, not what was going on in the world.

If you're curious, the Wikipedia article is more informative:

Thanks to an aggressive media marketing campaign, bundling with various consumer-oriented computers such as IBM's PS/1 and PS/2, as well as various clones and Hayes modems, the Prodigy service soon had more than a million subscribers. To handle the traffic, Prodigy built a national network of POP (points of presence) sites that made local access numbers available for most homes in the US. This was a major factor in the expansion of the service since subscribers did not have to dial long-distance to access the service. The subscriber only paid for the local call (usually free), while Prodigy paid for the connection to its national data center in Yorktown, New York.

Sounds expensive.

Prodigy's initial business model relied more on advertising and online shopping for cash flow than monthly subscriptions. Subscribers were charged a flat monthly fee that provided unlimited access. Initially, a monthly rate was charged for unlimited usage time and 30 personal messages. Subscribers could purchase additional messages. Later, Prodigy divided its service into "Core" and "Plus" sections. Core section usage remained unlimited, but Plus sections were limited by usage time. Subscribers were given a monthly allotment of Plus time. If that time was exceeded, the subscriber incurred additional charges based on usage time. Subscribers could discern what type of section they were in by the blue indicator in the bottom-right corner of the screen.

Prodigy's shopping applications initially underperformed relative to expectations. Reasons for difficulty in online shopping for Prodigy included the perception that online shoppers would pay a premium rather than expect discounts for merchandise. Another reason for poor online merchandising was the nature of the graphics presented due to inherent limitations of technology at the time. Using the early NAPLPS graphic standard, it was not possible to render realistic images of products. As such, while commercial clients with presence on the Prodigy Service might have realized a measure of success with an electronic order blank supporting a print catalog, it was otherwise difficult for online merchants to market products.

[...]

Two of Prodigy's most popular services turned out to be its message boards and email. Because Prodigy's business model depended on rapidly growing advertising and online shopping revenue, email was developed primarily to aid shopping, not for general communication between users, which is what it became. The message boards resulted in users being connected to the service far longer than projected. This resulted in higher than expected expenses, adversely affecting the service's cash flow and profitability.

To control costs and raise revenue, Prodigy took two separate actions. First, in January 1991, Prodigy modified their basic subscriber plans by allowing only 30 email messages free each month, while charging 25 cents for each additional email message—a policy that was later rescinded. In the summer of 1993, it began charging hourly rates for several of its most popular features, including its most popular feature, the message boards. This policy was later rescinded after tens of thousands of members left the service.

Some context: back then, everything in computing was more expensive, including networking (phone lines, modems, long distance calls) and computing (mainframes and minicomputers). For comparison, an early bulletin board service started by some California idealists called The Well charged $2 per hour back then, and some people would run up big bills chatting.

There were also free bulletin boards run by hobbyists, but often with only one or two phone lines, and you would pay any long distance charges yourself. Sometimes they'd only be open at night so that the phone line could be used during the day.

In retrospect, figuring out how to provide bulletin boards cheaply might have been a better business plan.