Not that long ago, I found myself attempting to push back—respectfully—on the idea that we can one day make Hive the perfect platform. My goal with that post, with that exploration if you will, wasn’t to attack those who are working to improve this place, but to remind them that we must not make perfect the enemy of good—or better.
When I wrote that post, I had already opened an account on Medium, and I found myself staring at very familiar issues over there. The seven dwarves live there too: Spammy, Scammy, Fakey, Colludy—you know them all too well yourself.
That being said, it's obvious that Medium is working. It's obvious that there are people who make a living writing there. But the uphill battle has an incline that feels like it requires professional hiking gear. Here, some people begin acquiring tokens the same day they open an account. For others, it may take longer, but it's obvious it's not nearly as hard to be seen.
This week though, I shared that I had decided to open a Substack account. An obvious move, I submit, since more and more it seems to be the platform on the lips of many influential online figures. My first impressions do ring true, it appears. They've cracked the code for content discovery on that side of the pond. The layout—although confusing at first—has grown on me, and I'm finding myself intuitively surfing those waters without much trouble.
However, as I’ve zoomed in—or dove deeper into the water (pick your favorite metaphor)—I began discovering the ugly fish. Or should I say, the floating turds. Substack is littered with follow-for-follow engagement. When I say "littered," I mean that literally. My feed has been kidnapped by a legion of bot accounts attempting to harvest followers for, I’m sure, later monetization. A common practice in the world of Instagram, where channels get sold or rented after reaching a certain size.
I’ve also found people complaining about this—an opposing force, if you will—pathetically failing, ironically, with the Streisand effect it ends up nurturing.
All this to say, I'm more and more convinced that the dead internet theory is likely what will end up killing social media. Bots, bots galore. Either that’s true, or there really is an account called Emma Horsedick who genuinely loves my stuff.
