I’m old enough to have lived through the rise and fall of a few different eras in online communication. Chat programs, message boards, blogs, social media — no platform lives forever and whether it’s due to advances in technology, waning interest or various other reasons, there’s always an inevitable downward slide into irrelevance or obsolescence. We’ve seen it before and it definitely feels like we’re seeing again with some of the big players.

My first foray into connecting with others on the ol’ INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY was in the mid/late 90’s — the infamous America Online and its vast array of chat rooms. Organized by topic, they were often crazy, chaotic, lewd, stupid, hilarious, not to mention tons of fun at the time. Eventually the novelty wore off, but I’d met a few people there that would come along for the journey over to AOL’s Instant Messenger program where we could now chat 1-on-1 via the AIM client. Though I never used IRC / ICQ very much, those chat programs were popular. At the same time, there were a number of e-mailing lists you could join with lengthy discussion based around certain topics or organized by website owner, in the format of back-to-back email replies.

Then of course there were web-logs and webrings – wherein you’d write about your day/life/whatever on your own website, maybe post a photo in your gallery, and link to others with their own pages. Taught myself how to build websites from scratch in order to do so (“This site made with Notepad!”) and met a lot of cool people. Naturally, my first site was on Geocities but eventually my friends and I graduated to hosting our own sites with their own domain names. In fact, this very site was one I’d used in the past and was resurrected on a whim earlier this year. Online forums / message boards were booming as well, covering any topic you could think of.

The weblog community at the time felt new and exciting. Everyone was exploring what it meant to be “online” and while we were finding new ways to be connected, we were still very much independent. Your website was your own little corner of the web to cultivate and maintain and you’d go off to visit other people’s sites via bookmarks, links or just manually typing in the URL, but it was always a mission. Oftentimes this also led to having a separation between your “real life” and your “online” persona. Not that we were faking personalities – in fact, weblogs could be intensely personal – but having to physically sit at a keyboard and mouse to dial-in to the internet meant you were devoting a portion of your day to, essentially, being kindof a weirdo. Being online 24/7 was definitely not socially accepted for a few more years to come. Personally I liked the separation, it allowed me freedom to explore aspects of my personality (for good or bad), but even now I still have trouble reconciling the online vs IRL versions of myself.

. . .

My first experience with the early “social media” model was a little site called, hilariously, makeoutclub.com. As opposed to having your own space, all the site’s users were grouped together but could be filtered by location. The only digital real estate you received was a tiny rectangle where you’d upload a profile photo and post your “Interests” (usually what bands you liked or some vaguely “cool” song lyrics), along with your AIM name & website, so others in your area could find you to chat. Well, I never actually made out with anyone from Makeout Club (the name seemed tongue-in-cheek, no pun intended), but then again I did meet lots of cool people – some of whom I’m still in touch with.

Around the time MOC died (or at least I stopped using it), personal weblogs became too much work and another new site sprung up called LiveJournal. LJ let you sign in, post some crap and leave comments on your friend’s posts. I appreciated that you could type however much you wanted and post images, links and surveys as well. Lots of long comment chains where things could get as deep or as ridiculous as you wanted. Granted, LiveJournal got made fun of because of the name, but once again it was a place that I met lots of great people. Notably, I think, was that this was the first platform I’d used where your friends list was public and the concept of following & unfollowing other users became suddenly important (and to some, this was a Big Deal).

So yeah, I was around for Friendster and for MySpace – this is where Web 1.0 dies and the “nerdy” aspect of posting stuff online was really fading – and eventually got an invite for TheFacebook.com (signed up with my school email, which was then required). Facebook pretty much killed LiveJournal for me and everyone else I knew. It replaced weblogs, forums & message boards, AIM/MSN/Yahoo chats, personal emailing, etc… It killed MySpace and its Top 8, which by then had become a bit of a joke. We all know the story of Facebook’s fall from grace and it does not bear repeating here.

Metafilter, Digg and Reddit occupied some weird quasi-social media space, Google unsuccessfully tried their hand a few times at creating their own thing (Wave, Buzz, Google Plus), Twitter is a raging dumpster fire, Vine came and went, I’m too old for Snapchat, TikTok is cancer, and let’s not get started on crap like Parler or Truth Social.

All of this brings us to Instagram – a platform that I’ve enjoyed using despite the strange algorithm, the influencers, suggested posts, rampant ads, the recent push towards replicating the functionality and addictiveness of TikTok… Certainly I can feel the familiar ecosystem decline happening again. Like many of the communities I’ve been a part of before, it has that same sort of drop in connection from “real” users and feels stale compared to just a year ago. Frustratingly, IG and YouTube seem to be in competition to see who can make the worst ad-viewing experience to inflict upon their userbase.

. . .

Where do we go from here, when IG becomes another has-been app? Grainery was a nice experiment for film photographers but to get the most value out of it you needed to pay $3 a month – not a big deal to me, but could be a barrier to entry for many. Having the mobile app released would have been a great step, but unfortunately the developer disappeared from the face of the earth and from what I can tell everyone gave up on it. A new app is coming up called Foto and I’m cautiously watching its progress. Flickr is, sadly, never going to be an option despite how much I liked it back in the day. Do we find another platform? Do we go back to hosting our own websites? I’ve seen a few photographers who do this and it’s not a bad idea, the biggest issue is just getting people to click…

Personally, I’d love a return to the days of posting more long-form content at a slower pace, with feedback coming in the form of comments instead of likes. Not looking for academic-level discussion but I believe that being able to pour some energy into transferring thoughts from one’s brain to their screen can be healthy (most of the time). I’m not a talkative guy, nor do I have a great deal of talent in writing, but sometimes you need to get the words out without worrying about which hashtag to use so people will even see it. It’s something that doesn’t seem to happen often anymore, at least on the platforms I know and use. The focus on miniscule character limits, doomscrolling, 15-second videos and quick dopamine hits has completely rotted our attention spans – scroll and like, scroll and like, scroll and like…

It could totally be nostalgic thinking or rose-tinted glasses, but I think we got the balance right when online interaction happened away from our phones. Maybe it’s back to weblogs for me? Will you sign my guestbook?