Why do people use Medium?
Somehow Medium has become the defacto platform for professional blogging, and I have no idea why.
As far as I can tell, the bulk of people have an unexplainable attraction to creepy corporate interfaces.
Livejournal, which had what I would characterize as a normal interface that behaves more or less as a person would expect it to, was somewhat popular with young people (and Russian political activists) for a little bit, but never took off with the "parents" generation the way that Facebook (whose major interface innovation when it got off the ground seems to have been something called a superpoke) did.
Livejournal was fun and promoted creativity. Facebook was built on.... I don't know? ...some kind of weird intersection of memes and peer pressure? There was always this weird conformity thing where everyone was making the same jokes and engaging in the same activities.
And yet, Facebook took off while Livejournal stagnated. 90% of the people who I used to interact with on Livejournal left LJ/DW for Facebook and very few of them ever came back. Everyone hates Facebook, but everyone also needs to be there. For some reason.
When Twitter came on the scene, people made jokes about how stupid its entire model was. How could you possibly express anything with such stringent character limits?
And yet Twitter took off as well.
Twitter, unlike Facebook and Livejournal, has a veneer of professionalism, which is also very mysterious to me. What's the magic sauce that makes Twitter into the go-to place for professional microblogging?
Whatever it is that Twitter has, it certainly isn't good interface design. Even Facebook has better threading.
But for some reason Twitter is the place to be if you're a public intellectual or pundit.
People say that the appeal of Facebook is that everyone else is there. Social network effects are offered as an explanation for why no one to speak of left Facebook for the federated Facebook clone Diaspora, but there has to be something else going on besides network effects.
People do leave Facebook. They just don't (as a general rule) leave it for more democratic platforms. The big social media are all corporate.
A decent handful of my friends made a concerted effort to move from Facebook to Diaspora. It didn't work. Was it doomed to fail from the beginning? And why?
These days the same general crowd seem to have flocked to Discord. Again, why?
Discord might be an outlier here, in that a core of people got drawn in by gaming stuff (I don't actually know the details; I'm not part of that culture), and then once there's a critical network size it can make sense for things to take off, especially if a lot of the people being drawn in are into gaming as well. So maybe Discord gets a pass.
But I'm utterly baffled by these others.
In a very weird way Gmail is another example. There used to be a good handful of online companies offering free email services. Gmail lured everyone away, and it isn't clear to me why. People started giving out free Gmail accounts and then suddenly everyone had to have one.
Allegedly the appeal was the free data storage ("we'll give you a Gig of data storage and allllll you have to do is let us comb through your data for advertising purposes"... because that isn't creepy at all), but I don't think that most people actually need that much storage space. It really felt more like everyone suddenly said "oooh... sketchy contract?? I'll sign!"
@dynamic Gmail equals "free" and portable email for users of all platforms is the reason I've always thought it was popular. The idea of personal data mining is relatively new for most people, and even with the concept in place, most people don't really believe it affects them adversely. i.e., "you get free online services for better targeted advertising? Win, win!" is the attitude.
Gmail also seemed to handle spam better than Hotmail, which was it's "free" predecessor.
@dynamic It was never more portable than those, but it did seem to have better spam filters. Anti Microsoft kept some people away from Hotmail. As far as Yahoo! <shrug>...for me Yahoo! always seemed kind of pushy and advertising driven. Way more than Google twenty years ago. Google did have the appearance of less evil back then; certainly way less than Microsoft or AOL.
@lwriemen @dynamic that wasn't far off from when Microsoft got done for the whole Internet Explorer thing and AOL were widely hated for being impossible to cancel.
Paradoxically I think we're getting close to the same thing happening now with FB and Google. Just it turns out in 2023 we're willing to accept genocide, election manipulation, psyops tests, and crazy data exploitation before we collectively say no
@lwriemen
Can you talk more about Gmail's portability as a draw? I'm not sure what would have made Gmail more portable than Yahoo or Hotmail.