Will Substack Be The Next Facebook and/or Xwitter?

image by Mike Licht on flickr, CC BY 2.0 Facebook and Xwitter are dying. Their membership is shrinking, their usage is dropping, and satisfaction with them is at an all-time low. Copycat “social media” have arisen, but they lack the huge user base to replace the wreckage of today’s greedy oligopolies with something better, and their owners seem as devoid of imagination as the tech bros they’re trying to supplant. To understand the enshittified wreckage of today’s “social media”, I think it might be helpful to think of it in metaphorical terms. To that end, let me start with a question: What useful functionality have these ‘media’ tried (very badly) to replace? Primarily, I think, two things: the means (“platforms”) by which we connect with and share news and thoughts with people we care about (formerly done by the telephone, by mail, and by in-person visits on our front porches and at pubs and cafés; and the repositories (public and private) in which we maintain and store our…