Why This? Why Now?

I made an account on Orkut in 2009. In those days, internet connections were expensive and (super)slow. I didn’t have my own pc, but luckily, one of my uncles got a job in the city as a PhP developer. He stayed with us for a few years and he had a PC that I could use. Most people around me didn’t have any virtual social presence. And no one was bombarded with an insane amount of curated and unnecessary information like we are today. The social sites didn’t let an algorithm take over the feed as they do now, and everyone read their friend’s posts. People constantly edited/configured their online profiles and almost used them as diaries. A person’s social presence was an extension to their real life presence. This behavior continued as we collectively moved to Facebook.

Being in India, you de facto have a lot of acquaintances. It was very common to have hundreds of Facebook friends even in 2010. I used to come back from school eager to put my thoughts down on Facebook and read what my friends had to say about them in the comments. I loved reading posts from others, even though most were spammy or bad attempts at humor. FB evolved over the years. It had communities or groups, and it had thousands of viral pages that everyone followed. You could do anything that any other social media app lets you do on FB. The feed became algorithmic, the standard content people saw was the content posted by famous pages or famous people. And people started posting their opinions in communities(groups). It was fun for a while. The problem with groups is that a tiny number of people end up posting and sharing their thoughts. Groups are usually full of people with a shared passion and strong opinions on that topic which makes being a ‘casual’ very hard. And if you cater to ‘casual’ posters, the ‘seasoned’ posters who generate the most content get put off and stop posting. It’s a double-edged sword. Either way, the interaction gets stale and predictable after a while.

Heterogeneous people keep a social circle healthy in the longer run. Globalization already forces people to consume the same content, music, food, and fashion worldwide. The world is already very homogenous. Maybe better recommendation algorithms can solve this problem. Maybe.

As the migration happened to Instagram, Snap, Clubhouse, back to Instagram, I moved along too. Fast forward to 2021, none of my friends were posting on FB and I got rid of my account. I haven’t found a platform like early FB since. A place where I can post about anything and any media, and the platform actually shows it to people who want to see it. Instagram is trying to do that now with stories. But the problem with Instagram stories is I can’t write a post like this there. So I decided to go back to good old blogging. I realize that not as many people would read this compared to a social site. But for now, I want to put my thoughts down on a keyboard and write, not worrying about who is reading them.

“Gopi, What about Twitter?” “I love Twitter Elon.”