Are Starting To Take the Internet Back from Platforms?
Maybe there's a good reason we haven't gotten a "new Twitter."
The internet sensation Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared has launched its own website. A dozen or so years ago, this kind of thing wouldn’t feel like news — but in the age of “platforms,” fans have become used to many of the most popular entertainers, influencers, and brands simply piggybacking onto existing sites like Twitch, YouTube, Squarespace, and the like.
Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared — a trippy, horror-comedy webseries that launched in 2022 — isn’t the first big entity to return to a pre-social internet approach. As Radio Dead Air’s Nash noted on Bluesky, it follows similar moves by comedy video brand Dropout and geek-favorite Critical Role.
This is notable in the way that it threatens the dominance of platforms like YouTube and Twitch just as U.S. regulators are trying to strangle TikTok to death. But it’s also part of what could be a broader movement.
And if it is, it’s probably a good movement for independent artists and consumers alike.
It’s been just over two years since Elon Musk bought Twitter — I know, it seems much longer, doesn’t it? — and set off a race to become “the new Twitter.” Musk, a prolific troll whose descent into transphobia and right-wing extremism had already started to turn off some of his former followers, doubled down on all his most annoying aspects after buying the platform, and anyone to the left of Mussolini started to wonder whether Twitter was worth the aggravation.
Out of that, we got an influx of new users to Mastodon, a decentralized, Linux-based social network that was too content being niche to change itself for the masses. Then there was Spoutible, CounterSocial, Hive, Threads, and more. Substack — the site you’re likely reading this on right now — launched their own Notes feature to chew up some of Twitter’s market share, and even Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey put a bunch of money into Bluesky. Dorsey isn’t there anymore, but Bluesky seems to have found itself the de facto home to much of the online left.
I’ve already talked about that. A couple of times, actually.
Twitter was never really the dominant force in social media that it was made out to be. I don’t think there was ever a time that Facebook and Instagram weren’t getting significantly more traffic and engagement, and I can tell you firsthand that as someone who used Twitter for work, you don’t see a lot of actual clickthrough there. More recently, it had come out that both Facebook and Twitter have been throttling external links for years in the hopes of keeping users on the platform. Meta (Facebook) has also integrated Instagram directly with Threads, hoping to turn their Twitter clone into an extension of Instagram and keep people scrolling through both in a constant loop.
Still, Twitter was treated by its users and the corporate media as “the internet’s town square.” That was the premise underlying Musk’s purchase of the site, which he claimed he wanted to turn into a haven for unrestricted free speech.
Twitter, as a microblogging site, was able to capture the zeitgeist in a way that was more difficult for the likes of Facebook and YouTube. After all, when an entire platform is built around pithy remarks, it’s going to be really easy to engineer that content into a funny bit on The Tonight Show. As such, the proliferation of (often small and/or niche) microblogging sites was a source of frustration for many users, who just wanted a direct, 1:1 replacement for Twitter. If Twitter was going to become a wasteland, they reasoned, why not just re-create the site’s culture and vibe in another space?
That’s much easier said than done, as it turns out, and each new app was constantly being measured against Twitter. That means that even after Twitter both figuratively and literally lost its identity — rebranding to X — people who left the site in a huff kept returning to it, often making the excuse that they were “fighting the good fight” over there (here’s a great look at why that’s dumb), or “just keeping their handle warm” for the day when Musk would get bored and sell it off (more understandable).
Ultimately, though, it has been two years. While Bluesky and Threads have emerged as the two biggest Twitter competitors, and X itself appears to be in free-fall, losing advertisers at an alarming rate as well as a reported 60,000 users per day for a week at a time, there is not a single, monolithic “new Twitter,” as so many people hoped for in 2022.
And that’s…probably good?
Most people over 35 or so have a (perhaps naive) longing for the more decentralized days of the internet, when everyone made their own websites and all of the power wasn’t in the hands of a small handful of companies. Yeah, YouTube provides some users with an easy way to host and monetize their videos, but that opportunity comes with a ton of stipulations — and you have to conform to the site’s culture.
The same is true of social media platforms who will downrank your content if it doesn’t match their brand image, appeal to the customer base they’re chasing, or whatever else. Doubly so when everyone is selling their merch on Squarespace and processing payments with Square. The centralization of the internet, which made it feel less like a sprawling wilderness and more like a bustling city, has crowded a lot of people (and a lot of business models) out.
We aren’t going to see the actual end to platforms. There will always be centralization to some extent on the internet, because for many people, it’s actually a boon. But it does seem like the creative community is starting to back away from the extremely regimented, limited version of the internet that has been dominant for years now.
On top of the things we have already discussed, there’s another aspect to it: control of your content. Not just control of who sees it, in the sense that algorithm-driven sites are always likely to prioritize engagement bait, but control of the actual files. It isn’t uncommon for third-party platforms like YouTube to simply zap a video out of existence if it’s found in violation of policy — and on more than one occasion, videos deleted either by YouTube or by other members of a production team end up as lost media. If you’re in control of the site/platform, the odds of that happening go down dramatically.
It’s also nice to have control over things like what kind of esoteric merch you can sell. After all, many ecommerce sites are pretty regimented, leading to many indie artists forced into selling variations on the same handful of products.
The move away from these centralized platforms and into more niche spaces where creators have control and middlemen get less money is a promising idea. In both form and motivation, it ties into the broader movement away from the corporate-controlled media by in recent months by the American left.
A brief tangent. I promise it pays off.
In the eyes of many, Donald Trump is not simply a candidate with whom they disagree, but someone who poses an existential threat to the United States as a nation. Many of his policies are unpopular, but since most Americans are woefully uneducated about current events, it can be difficult to convince people of that. Just before the election, a YouGov survey showed broad support for Democratic policies almost across the board — but more than half of self-described Trump supporters believed a number of Harris policies to be Trump policies. That means they were planning to vote against policies they liked, but they didn’t actually know that.
(Using that survey as context, it’s not quite as surprising that there have been a number of “I can’t believe I voted to take away my own healthcare!” stories in recent weeks.)
In a case like that, the “horse race” style of coverage, which focuses on the race itself, the political nuts and bolts, and the candidates’ personalities, will favor Trump. If the media had been covering the issues in a clear and meaningful way, it would have been disadvantageous to him. But the horse race is great for ratings, and has increasingly been the only way many mainstream outlets cover big races.
This frustration was thrown into sharper relief when, in the waning days of the election, The Washington Post declined to endorse a candidate. The nearly-unprecedented move was made at the direction of Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner, and when it came out that a billionaire was dictating editorial policy to the paper, more than 200,000 readers left in short order.
Many of those people are likely to just pocket the difference, especially given how tight the economy is and the looming threat of Trump tariffs. Some, though, have made it a point to reinvest that money into independent or alternative media. Local news around the U.S. has been in deep economic trouble for years, thanks in part to the rise of social media platforms. The unified “town squares” (if you will…!) throw their weight behind larger, national outlets that are more likely to generate a lot of engagement.
For years, the American right has thrown its support behind a conservative media apparatus, operating on the premise that mainstream media outlets are all left-leaning. The degree to which this is true is pretty debatable, but it has become increasingly clear that the role of big money in both politics and the media seems to be pushing what is considered “mainstream” discourse farther to the right on most economic issues.
Left-leaning outlets like MSNBC (and centrist outlets like CNN, which the right perceives to be leftist) have taken a huge ratings hit in the wake of the election. There are probably a lot of reasons for it, but one is obvious: the American left has lost faith in the independence and trustworthiness of a media industry that seemed hell-bent on normalizing Trump. With the right already sequestered in their own media cocoon, there is nowhere to get new viewers from as the left loses interest.
As the left begins to diversify their media investments — and likely tries to build a progressive media infrastructure to combat the right’s dominance on cable and radio — one hopes it will lead to a broader variety of news sources, some of which will be the trashy, left-wing equivalents to Fox News, but hopefully some of which will also be valuable, offering new perspectives and broadening the overall discourse.
If that happens, and media consumers can pull some of the marketshare away from craven billionaires, it could have a similar impact on both the media itself and the audience that moves away from social content platforms promise to have on independent artists. In the same way Bluesky promises social media users a more comforting experience, hopefully these other industries can break away from the monopolies that have been enshittifying them for the last decade or so.