A Feed to Call One’s Own
Friends, hello. This is Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Cregneta. This intro was recorded, on the way to George's house actually. If you read the newsletter, you probably know that she lives in this, like, big spooky mansion on the edge of town.
Mike Rugnetta:None of us have ever been, but, she told me to walk here this afternoon, which is strange, and to make sure that I recorded this intro, for the episode before I got there, but I've been so busy and I thought, I don't know, maybe it would be nice to do it on route, with my handheld recorder. Get the sounds of the birds and the wind and the trees and stuff, but, it's actually like eerily quiet over here. It also looks like it's about to start pouring rain. So, it's a good thing I'm close. Anyways, I'm about to hit the driveway.
Mike Rugnetta:She also said, to bring the segment that we've been working on with contributing producer Noah Hertz on a cassette tape, which is really highly irregular but whatever. I have that too. We'll find out soon enough what all that's about. Man, now that I'm here, Georgia's place is huge. I'm not sure how I feel about all the vines, but she did get that giant Home Depot skeleton.
Mike Rugnetta:I don't think I've ever actually seen one of these up close and it's, woah. It's actually It's really lifelike. Is it? Is it looking at me? Okay.
Mike Rugnetta:I'm just, let's just go inside. Georgia. Georgia. Hey. Can you even hear me inside that what?
Mike Rugnetta:What?
Georgia Hampton:Oh, hey, guys. It's producer Georgia. So glad you could come over. Oh, great. Mike left his cassette tape recording of his segment for this week's episode.
Georgia Hampton:Yes. But we'll we'll listen to that later. Speaking of Mike, he's, well, he's unavailable, so I'm doing the news. But, oh my god, don't worry. I'm sure we'll find him later or parts of him.
Georgia Hampton:Anyway, come in. Here, come on over to the parlor. I already lit the fire for us. Oh, come on. Don't be scared.
Georgia Hampton:Get comfortable. Take a load off. Sit down. Awesome. Now that we're all settled in, let's get going on the news this week.
Georgia Hampton:I have just four things to tell you about. Archive.org's much loved wayback machine was hacked in a major way. Internet bad guys stole a database that included the information of 31,000,000 users. People first noticed the breach when they saw a JavaScript alert on the site that read, quote, have you ever felt like the Internet archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened.
Georgia Hampton:See 31,000,000 of you on HIBP. HIBP stands for the have I been pwned data breach notification service. I plugged my email into HIBP and I'm definitely on there. So might wanna go check to see if you are too. I've heard of doubling and tripling down, but it seems like automatic CEO, Matt Mullenweg, is quadrupling down on his you're either with me or against me approach to this whole WordPress versus WP Engine debacle.
Georgia Hampton:For the last couple of months, Mullenweg has been conducting what he himself called a scorched earth nuclear approach against WP Engine, a website hosting platform that has been using WordPress software. Now, he started threatening his own employees, saying that if anyone talks to the press or isn't aligned with his beliefs, they should quit, or as he wrote in a memo, be fired tomorrow with no severance. I'm no expert, but this seems like a take a deep breath and count to 3 moment for old Matt. Turns out that the hottest restaurant in Austin, Texas isn't real. Grub Street reported that the chic, trendy spot ethos, which boasts 73,000 Instagram followers, is actually just an account posting AI slop.
Georgia Hampton:People quickly caught on to the ruse since the photos often had, shall we say, big AI energy, a chicken wing that looks like it's about the size of a motorcycle, celebrity cameos from the uncanny valley, and an obviously fake croissant shaped into a near photo accurate likeness of the baby hippo, Mu Dang. This is just one in a long line of fake AI slop restaurants popping up on Instagram and nobody knows why they exist. And finally, the seemingly impenetrable mister Beast empire is starting to show a couple of cracks. Since the summer, people have been unearthing questionable connections between mister Beast himself, otherwise known as Jimmy Donaldson, and the likes of Logan Paul and Peter Thiel and a nameless person on the mister Beast payroll who was a registered sex offender. Now, there's been more backlash against Lunchly, the quote unquote healthier alternative to Lunchables that Donaldson just rolled out, with one YouTube reviewer claiming that the snack pack she opened had mold covered cheese inside it.
Georgia Hampton:Not sure if this is enough to make a dent in mister Beast's gargantuan reputation, but I guess time will tell. We've got a great show for you this week. Two segments about the value and risk of small closed communities online. First, you'll hear me talk to doctor Alice Marwick about the Facebook group, are we dating the same guy and how gossip, gender, and privacy overlap online. Then you'll hear contributing producer Noah Hertz talking about existing on the best social media platform you've never heard of.
Georgia Hampton:But before that, let's see if we can find Mike. I'm sure we can dig him up or, locate him somewhere in this dusty, old place. Okay. Now, where could he be? Oh, I totally know where he is.
Georgia Hampton:Come on, right in here. So this is my laboratory. Take a look around. I swear I saw Mike in here earlier. Oh, wait.
Georgia Hampton:Oh my god. Don't touch that.
Mike Rugnetta:It's getting close to bedtime, our favorite time.
Georgia Hampton:Okay. So, let me just, trapsoul of my evil ex boyfriend. Long story, I I don't wanna talk about it. Let's let's get out of here. Mike must have wandered off somewhere else.
Georgia Hampton:Oh, you know what? Actually, this is my recording studio. Do you mind if I just step in here for a second? I gotta just run a segment real quick. I'll be back.
Georgia Hampton:I promise. Just, don't wander off. Okay? Wouldn't want you to get decapitated or something. Kidding.
Georgia Hampton:I'll be right back. This spring, the Chicago branch of the Facebook group, are we dating the same guy? Blew up in the news because 27 of the women in the group were being sued by a man for defamation who claimed that they, and the group, were ruining his reputation. And this was a big deal because are we dating the same guy is a very private Facebook group. It's actually a community of over 200 private Facebook groups and it operates as a space for women and fem people to vet potential dates.
Georgia Hampton:Members post photos or texts or whatever info they have to check-in with other people in their area to see if this guy is, to put it plainly, a good person. But to get into the group, you have to follow a whole suite of rules. No information, no photos, no anything is supposed to leave the group ever. So, it was a shock to see that somehow, this guy found out about what the people in the group were saying about him. Now, the Chicago lawsuit ended up failing in spectacular fashion.
Georgia Hampton:Seriously, look it up. But I'm more interested in this group itself because it seems like online, you have to take some pretty aggressive measures to keep a community safe, especially a community for a marginalized group, and even then, privacy isn't always guaranteed. It can be very difficult to ensure a level of security for any space on the Internet for a lot of reasons, but it's also essential, for a lot of reasons, to maintain these groups. So I talked to doctor Alice Marwick, who's the director of research at the Data and Society Research Institute. Her work specifically explores the notion of collective privacy on the Internet.
Georgia Hampton:And in her mind, are we dating the same guy is, in large part, a reflection of a changing dating landscape, one that's gone almost entirely online.
Alice Marwick:So before online dating, you mostly met people through friends of friends or at work. And in those situations, you have a group of people that you can kind of gut check with. Like, oh, hey. I met this guy. He's cute.
Alice Marwick:He asked me out. What's his deal? And you could kind of use what, you know, historically, has been called the Whisper Network to kind of find out a little bit about it. But with online dating, you are in a world where the dating pool is much bigger and those people aren't necessarily connected to anybody you know in your real life. So the group acts as a replacement for that.
Georgia Hampton:There's a code of camaraderie here that feels familiar to me and I think would feel familiar to a lot of femme people, This notion of being a girl's girl. To me, are we dating the same guy, the many city specific versions of it, feels like a digital version of the women's bathroom. Exactly.
Alice Marwick:I mean, what we see in these spaces is it really is a place for women to gain support in the dating world. A lot of the times, people will post like, this guy did something, and I don't know what it means. Can you help me explain this text message? Or can you what what might he have been thinking by doing this? Or, you know, just kind of run of the mill relationship problems, but kind of running it past a larger group than just maybe a group chat that you have that's women or your girlfriends or whatever.
Alice Marwick:So this is kind of a group of people who are all grappling with these dynamics, and they're able to kind of lean on each other to do it together.
Georgia Hampton:Is that gossip?
Alice Marwick:Oh, it's totally gossip. In the way that gossip has been traditionally conceptualized, gossip is women's talk. Right? When men talk about the same topics, it's not considered gossip. So gossip has always been gendered feminine regardless of what it's actually about.
Alice Marwick:Mhmm. When women are having conversations about social lives and relationships or even things like celebrities, right, that's always denigrated as gossip, and gossip has been seen historically as unimportant, as frivolous, of a sign of a weak mind, as someone who doesn't have their head screwed on straight, who doesn't care about important things. But gossip has really important value. It is about making moral judgments on people on your community and reinscribing the values of that community as a whole. Sometimes, it's just fun or entertaining, but sometimes, it's like, oh, this person cheated on this other person.
Alice Marwick:Doesn't that suck? Isn't that person a scumbag? And then you and the person you're talking to are kind of affirming that you share that judgment of cheating being a bad thing. These are important conversations for people to have, and sometimes it's much easier to have them in a sort of, like, light hearted gossipy way than to sit down and be like, alright, guys. Today, we're gonna talk about surrogacy.
Alice Marwick:That's just not how people talk.
Georgia Hampton:I wanna return to this metaphor of the women's bathroom and the groups like are we dating the same guy kind of offering a digital version of that. If I go to the women's bathroom in a bar, I know that space is secure in general. Online, I feel in my experience, it is often very difficult to actually completely designate those spaces in the same way. I mean, the lawsuit against the Chicago branch of are we dating the same guy to me is a great example of that. Somehow, this got to that guy.
Georgia Hampton:Does gossip have to be private?
Alice Marwick:I think this is complicated by the fact that Internet communication dynamics are deeply gendered as well. There's very few spaces on the Internet, I think, where you can have a pseudonymous community or an anonymous community that is mostly women. The closest thing to it, I think, is subreddits that are devoted to stereotypically feminine topics, right, like makeup or skin care or fitness or shopping. Because for the most part, men don't want to infiltrate those communities. Reddit has this big community called, I think it's called, like, 2 x x chromosomes or something, and it used to be their default women's community.
Alice Marwick:But it is now full of men trying to, like, argue with the women and, you know, dismiss their experiences. And this goes back to the very earliest days of the Internet. So even when women have wanted to go into spaces to talk about women's issues without heavily policing and moderating who are actually in those spaces, you often find that a woman's only space is very threatening to men.
Georgia Hampton:You're completely correct. That has certainly been my experience. I'm curious if you if you have in mind a space where where your identity can be known, but that privacy does exist and those conversations can exist.
Alice Marwick:I think, personally, it is impossible to have a wide broad based social media platform that requires people to use their real names and have a single account and still have substantive discussion on that platform and have people enjoy using it. I think that's one of the reasons why Facebook has declined so much with young people and why the people I know who are still on Facebook are either there for their families or because there's Facebook groups that they really like. When you look at other sites, right, like Instagram might not be perfect, but you can have multiple Instagram accounts and you don't have to use your real name. Reddit has its issues, but you can have a pseudonym and you can have as many Reddit accounts as you want. They all have their pros and cons, but this desire to tie things to this, like, single persistent username that is legally who you are, that is very dangerous for a lot of people, especially for women.
Alice Marwick:You don't always want your thoughts on politics or the news or anything tied to your real name. Right? Like, there there can be professional repercussions for that. There can be personal repercussions for that. When people talk about how anonymity online is so terrible because it creates harassment, I think anonymity online or pseudonymity online is absolutely necessary for people who are members of minoritized and marginalized groups to have real conversations about the difficulties in their lives.
Alice Marwick:It
Georgia Hampton:it simply isn't safe otherwise. In are we dating the same guy? What are the things
Mike Rugnetta:that make this space different than other spaces that have
Georgia Hampton:tried to create this level of privacy? What are they doing that others haven't succeeded in doing as well?
Alice Marwick:I think the thing is that for a lot of groups that probably do succeed, we just don't know about them. Right? Because they're small and they're heavily moderated and they're very careful about who they let in. Are we dating the same guy? What they've done is they've been very explicit about what the moderation and the norms are.
Alice Marwick:Before you even join the group, you have to read this, like, whole thing, this whole set of rules. You have to agree with them. You have to agree, like, I if I don't abide by these, I'm gonna get kicked out. And one of the biggest rules of the group is no screenshotting. Like, no screenshotting at all.
Alice Marwick:I don't care if you're screenshotting it because you think some girl is, like, a fierce queen or because you wanna send your friend something that was hilarious. No screenshotting because that is a privacy violation because the information is going outside of a group that has a certain set of information norms and into who knows where to be shared with who knows who. And people will call each other out on norm violations, like I've said. I think successful Internet communities in general require very high levels of moderation. The problem is that moderation is always unpaid.
Alice Marwick:So you have to have people who are willing to say, like, I'm willing to spend this many hours of my week moderating this forum, and you have to have enough of them so that all the burden isn't falling on one person. And that's a big ask. Right? That's a lot of emotional labor as well as just the unpaid labor of doing the moderation.
Georgia Hampton:So to me, this goes back to questions of expectations of privacy online. How much can we expect our experiences to be private?
Alice Marwick:I think on sites like Facebook or x, there's very little expectation of privacy, and I think most people have figured that out at this point. What we see nowadays is it's much more likely that people engage in what I call social segmentation. So they'll use different apps or different communication media to communicate with different kinds of people. So if you just think about your own life. Right?
Alice Marwick:Like, I have a text message group that's just like, you know, I message for my, like, close girlfriends in New York. I have a signal group of my friends from college. I have another signal group of my coworkers from my old job. I have a Slack for my coworkers from my current job. So rather than having to come up with one message that's appropriate for everyone in your life, which is what Facebook used to be like, now what people do is they're like, no.
Alice Marwick:I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna have an Instagram, and this is who I am on Instagram, and I'm gonna connect to people on Instagram who I think will appreciate, or I feel comfortable seeing that persona. But we still see situations in which, you know, if you're on TikTok, for example, TikTok has sides. There's BookTok. There's SwiftTok.
Alice Marwick:There's gay talk. There's conspiracy talk. And often, what we see is that someone will make a video for a side of TikTok, and then it'll cross the algorithm and go to a different side, and they'll get a ton of backlash because what is seen as normal on one side might be totally unacceptable on the other side.
Georgia Hampton:How can you replicate a feeling of safety in in gossiping online?
Alice Marwick:So I
Alice Marwick:think this requires two things. It requires a social scaffolding, but it also requires a technical scaffolding. There are sites like TikTok where it is impossible to create a hard boundary between, like, trans talk and the rest of TikTok. Like, if you're posting a video publicly on TikTok, there's always the risk that it's gonna go elsewhere. Even with are we dating the same guy?
Alice Marwick:Like, they have carved out a space on Facebook, but one of the reasons that screenshots are so verboten is because they are possible. You can circumvent the social norms technically, but the social norms are what prevent you from doing that. So you really need both of those things. Right? You need social norms, but you also need a website that is going to allow you to have a community where you can vet people and not just anyone can join.
Alice Marwick:And I think to a certain extent, there has to be a level of almost naive trust. Right? I think there's this idea of security by obscurity, which I think a lot of people adhere to, which is basically, like, no one's paying attention to what I'm doing because I'm not very important. Yes. Someone could get my personal information at any given time, but the government isn't gonna bother.
Alice Marwick:I'm not doing anything wrong. Right? Like, if I just kinda stay on the straight narrow, it doesn't matter. It's almost as, like, willful ignorance about possibility because otherwise, you can't really use social media and have private conversations at all. And that's how we communicate.
Alice Marwick:We share information with each other. We talk about other people. That's a very basic aspect of human society and human interaction. So I think that a lot of the women who are posting on this group are probably like, look, I know there's a chance that this might get out and the person I'm talking about might get upset, but I'm willing to risk it because it seems like it's a pretty low chance and the benefits that I'm getting or the benefits that I'm giving to this person seem worth it to me. So it's a sort of risk calculus, and I think people do that a lot in their lives.
Alice Marwick:Right? Like, they make assessments of whether they should do something based on whether they think it's going to happen or not. And sometimes, people are wrong. But it is, for the most part, it is unlikely that something you say in these groups is gonna get back to the person you're talking about. So for the most part, people's real risk calculus is probably accurate.
Alice Marwick:It's just that when it fails, the repercussions can be really bad.
Georgia Hampton:I wanna look at the dating component, the way that gossip can often exist online. So much of dating has moved to an online space. You make a dating profile, you can be seen by not just an endless number of people on the app, but anyone who wants to screenshot you, screen record your profile, share it with their friends, share it with TikTok, whatever. How does that affect our expectations of privacy in regards to dating?
Alice Marwick:I think it requires a degree of being willing to make yourself vulnerable just because you know that once it's out there, it's out there that other people can see it. They might be people that you know in other aspects of your life. It is difficult. Right? You're letting everyone know that you're single, that you're looking for someone.
Alice Marwick:That is a difficult thing to admit to a very broad public, especially when you don't know who is in that broad public. It could be your boss. Right? It could be your cousin. It could be somebody that you'd rather not see, you know, the most flattering picture of you that you've put on your dating profile.
Georgia Hampton:I mean, is there even such a thing as offline dating now even if you don't use the apps?
Alice Marwick:From what I've heard, this would really be better directed at someone whose expertise is dating, not online privacy. But it seems like a lot of people do stuff like run clubs, right, or, like, recreational sports leagues. You know, I do think there's a movement towards people want to meet other people in person.
Georgia Hampton:But even if you join a running club and meet someone through that or a ceramics class or whatever, at least in my experience, the first thing you do if you meet someone is find their Instagram.
Alice Marwick:That's true.
Georgia Hampton:Find their
Georgia Hampton:LinkedIn. Find anything. I don't know that I've ever had an experience dating that hasn't involved some level of digital sleuthing to some degree.
Alice Marwick:I mean, they used to call it Facebook stalking. Right? I I mean, yeah. I think what we call that social surveillance and that it's not like surveillance coming from the cops or a retail store. It's surveillance coming from your peers.
Alice Marwick:Right? Kind of people watching what you're up to. But when you're doing that kind of Facebook stalking or Internet sleuthing, you're not doing it just for, you know, the lols or just to be gossipy. You wanna know, like, does this person have a girlfriend or a boyfriend? Like, what is their job?
Alice Marwick:Like, who's in the pictures with them? Like, you're looking at all this information that you're amassing, and you're making judgment calls based on that. And that is a very human activity. Right? It's just all of a sudden that information is much more consolidated and easier to find.
Alice Marwick:Frankly, if I met somebody in a context and I went and searched from an on the Internet and I found nothing about them at all, like, nothing, not even like a Spokeo search result, I would be like, there is something weird here. This person Serial killer. Yeah. Serial killer or just using a fake name or being shady. Right?
Alice Marwick:Like, that just doesn't compute with how most people I know live their lives. So I I don't think it I think that's unavoidable. People are going to look at each other's Internet profiles mostly because you wanna get a better sense of who someone is if you're interested in them, but also because you wanna make sure you're not getting involved with somebody who might be a dubious personality.
Georgia Hampton:It sounds like you still have a safer bet of talking about who you're dating, asking these questions, gossiping in in the real world, in the ladies bathroom.
Alice Marwick:Pros and cons. Right? You are very unlikely to run into somebody who knows the person you're talking about in a women's bathroom or in your group chat with everyone you know from college. Right? Because you didn't meet the person using that network.
Alice Marwick:You met them using online dating, which is a much bigger, broader base. So I think the advantage of groups like, are we dating the same guy, is that you probably will get useful information about the person that you're seeing. The downside is there is a privacy risk. I think that the groups are trying to fill that gap with these social norms, supportiveness, you know, really trying to police and monitor what people are doing, but there is always a risk. I'm just glad that there are enough people who are willing to take that risk that they can help other women out in the process.
Georgia Hampton:Alice, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Where can people find more of your work online?
Alice Marwick:My website is tiara.org, like tiara, like a crown, tiara.org, and I'm Alice Tiara on all the social platforms.
Georgia Hampton:Thank you so much again.
Alice Marwick:It was great. It was really fun.
Georgia Hampton:When I was researching this segment, I almost tried joining the Chicago branch of are we dating the same guy, but in their list of rules, it says that if you talk about the group specifically on a podcast, you'd be automatically removed. So that was that. Plus, it feels more respectful to keep my distance. I mean, unless I actually need to use it someday. But I'd love to hear how you go about finding communities to ask for help, share information, or commiserate online?
Georgia Hampton:What has been helpful or frustrating about that experience? And for my own personal curiosity, do you think it's a red flag if someone has no social media footprint, or is it a green flag? You know how to reach us. It's in the show notes. Okay.
Georgia Hampton:Let's see. This house is so big sometimes I forget what's even in here. The store just says storage on it. What's even in here? Oh, my God, Hans.
Georgia Hampton:That's where I left you. So sorry. Oh, my God. Embarrassing, but don't worry. I didn't forget about our production meeting at 2.
Georgia Hampton:See you later. Okay. We've got the belfry, the portal to hell, and this is just the linen closet. Ugh, where could Mike be? Oh, right.
Georgia Hampton:That cassette tape you left for me. I have a great idea. Let's listen to this in the scullery. I don't know about you, but I am getting a little peckish. I'll put this tape on and we can snack while we listen.
Georgia Hampton:I'm sure there's something for us to nibble on. I do have this bowl of grapes that if you close your eyes, it feels like eyeballs. I love fun. Anyway, let's take a listen.
Mike Rugnetta:A few months ago, I had the pleasure of being on a video game podcast called Press Start. Co hosted by Tori Dominguez Peake, who you've met. She did the episode long segment about the AI service for communicating with your deceased loved ones. One of Tory's other press start co hosts is Noah Hertz, who you are about to meet. Noah is a reporter based in Florida, working for Jacksonville today, And he reached out wanting to tell us a story about the best social media network he's ever encountered.
Mike Rugnetta:One with just several 100 users that's named after its founder. Noah's time on this site began with the beginning of the end of Twitter. I'll let him tell you the rest.
Noah Hertz:When it was first rising to prominence, part of Twitter's main appeal was the short diary entry post. Limited to a 140 characters, there really wasn't room for much beyond eating cereal hashtag breakfast. Things are different these days on x.com, the everything website. And with the atmosphere so much more hostile, I don't post about myself there anymore. Because I work in a public facing career, my government name is attached to my account and I can't be bothered to have a burner account for bad jokes and disco Elysium memes.
Noah Hertz:I also don't post about my personal life because all it takes is the right keyword for a tweet to break containment and become awash with commentary from people I have no desire associating with and an army of bots. I could lock my account, but isn't the point of a social media platform with millions of users supposed to be sharing? Twitter got bad in a frog boiling alive sort of way. And if you can cast your mind back a few years, there were days when it seemed like the plug could be pulled on the website any day under its new musky leadership.
Lily Alexandre:We were all sort of worried that the website was just gonna die any second. Musk had fired everyone.
Noah Hertz:Yeah.
Lily Alexandre:There was no there was no certainty that the platform would continue existing. With that in mind, I had joined a couple other of the, like, alternate social media platforms. I got on cohost, I got on Mastodon. Haven't really used either of them, and I was bummed about that.
Noah Hertz:That's Lily.
Lily Alexandre:I make video essays about art, gender, the tech industry. You can find them by googling my name, Lily Alexander. Even if you spell it wrong, it'll still come up.
Noah Hertz:It was a post Lily made about a year ago that drove me to a strange small social platform I'd never heard of. I either hadn't clicked with or hadn't bothered to try most of the Twitter clones popping up. Blue Sky, Post, threads, cohost, rest in peace, Mastodon. The list goes on. But then there was David Social.
Noah Hertz:300 users marketed as the most centralized social media platform in the world, where you click a big button that says bootlick instead of following other users, where you can't share other users' posts, and where on Kosovo independence day 1 year, every post was auto translated into Albanian.
David:1st, imagine Craigslist, and then imagine Twitter. Then think of if Twitter was Craigslist. And also imagine that it was run entirely by one person, David, which is me.
Noah Hertz:That is David. They're from Montreal. David's quirky little website was born out of a joke, but also of a real desire for something different online.
David:I was at some random party in Western Canada and, we were just talking about social media and then this, like, joke kind of popped into my head. It was like, what if there was a David social where it was all David and David did everything? And then I think when Elon Musk bought Twitter Mhmm. That was sort of like the inciting event of everyone was kinda jumping ship. And I think, like, Facebook was making their own Twitter and stuff like that too.
David:And and I was like, hey, now would be a great time for David Social. And so I kind of like went into a delirious state for weeks and made like a minimum viable prototype. And it it was like very minimum and just so bare bones. And here we are. The Twitter competitor, the Twitter killer, David Social.
Noah Hertz:David is everything on David Social. Who else would run it? They're David. They're not just the site's founder, but they're the only administrator and the arbiter of who gets in. David is judge, jury, and if the site ever required it, executioner.
Noah Hertz:And that kind of power scares us when it's in the hands of someone like Elon Musk, but David sees it a little differently.
David:The modern Internet experience is one that's very financialized and one that feels really devoid of any sort of, like, human governance of any kind when you use online platforms. So I don't let in assholes. Basically, if someone approaches me on Twitter and is like, Hey, can I have a membership? Then I look through their Twitter profile and make sure they're not an asshole. So I think there's that filter, and just having that filter alone just makes the community more positive.
Noah Hertz:And the result, it's a community that can only be so big. It's got a built in bottleneck, David, who you kinda have to trust. I've been on the site for a year, and David hasn't given me any reason to distrust their leadership. David personally involves and celebrates the user base through sharing their creations and responding directly to requests for features or site wide holiday reskins. David must care about the site's users since there's no way they can turn a profit from the whole endeavor.
Noah Hertz:And when I say there's a bottleneck, I mean it. The maximum amount of people David believes David Social can sustain is a few 1,000 active users. The site could not possibly sustain every social media refugee. David is founder, developer, customer support, moderator, and the algorithm itself. Recommended posts that break up the site's main feed are hand selected by David.
Noah Hertz:The site maintenance is also all performed by them too. I haven't found a reason to believe that David's goal is anything other than creating a kinder place online. One separate from the algorithms designed to make us angry at each other so we see more ads. Take it from Lily, David Social username, pussy. She was one of David Social's first users.
Lily Alexandre:There's a friendliness to it that makes me want to not do discourse on their God. That would just be like unkind I think, because these are my friends and I'm I'm not gonna shout in a room with my friends. That's so rude. So often when I go to post on David it will be, hey, check out this nice thing that I saw recently because there is the global timeline. Right?
Noah Hertz:Mhmm.
Lily Alexandre:So just the notion of like making that a nicer place to hang out is a real motivator.
Noah Hertz:It's almost like you're you're describing Facebook before Facebook was like a vehicle for election disinformation and selling me things and making me watch short form video.
Lily Alexandre:Oh, funny. I hadn't even thought of that.
Noah Hertz:Yeah. Because like, I mean, that was the promise of Facebook, you know? It was go here because all
Lily Alexandre:your friends are here. Yeah. I also, the brand hostility that Facebook has never had. Like, you can't like pages on David's social. I think that is that is pretty big because I still use Facebook, but 90% of what I see is slop, garbage, whereas I think David would just kick that person off the website if that was happening on David's social.
Lily Alexandre:Like, you're not gonna use it to shill your stuff. You know?
David:I was alive for Internet 1 point o. I was there. I experienced it. I was, like, really big on the forums, especially, like, the game maker community forums
Noah Hertz:Oh, cool.
David:Back in the day. And, like, I made a lot of friends in the forums. And it's kinda sad that, like, the Internet experience has become very, like, singular through channel through, like, Facebook or
David:The walled gardens. Yeah.
David:Like that. Yeah. Yeah. And I kinda miss the days when, you can just stumble on upon someone's, like, personal website. And there's that amount of, like, there's just a feeling that there is, like, a person that architected it, and you can kind of feel who the person is through the website.
David:I think that vibe people are very attracted to.
Noah Hertz:Yeah.
David:There's this feeling of authenticity there. And I think that people are craving authenticity more and more. It sort of seems to be what's in right now even, I would go so far to say.
Noah Hertz:The average David social user is in their twenties or thirties. They're likely a member of the LGBT community, and they've got some niche interests like a game development or music production. Many of the users are Canadian with the early user base stemming from David's IRL friends and
Noah Hertz:spiraling from there. In terms of posts,
Noah Hertz:David's social users are almost always talking to each other
Noah Hertz:in a way we have maybe forgotten how to. With no
Noah Hertz:encouragement to retweet or build a following, David's are talking to other David's, not a curated feed. People post about the books they're reading, not to prove they read, but to turn other users onto what they like. They post about their jobs or school, not to network or geotag, but because it's fun to announce what you're up to. And plus, it means another David might offer to meet up. And when two Davids meet in person, that's always worth a post.
Noah Hertz:People post about their feelings on David's social too, and not just, I'm having a bad day, like, the real tough diary type stuff you only write when you're either really comfortable, or you think you're the only one who's going to read it. New crushes, bad breakups, dire mental health days the works. In such a small moderated community, I've never felt like I needed to worry about opening the replies on an earnest post to find a Nazi or a bot advertising a crypto scam. There's always real people there, and since the site is not focused on ad revenue above all else, there's no incentive to bicker and fight. The user base is a small enough and insular enough community that it feels like talking to a group of friends, even if you don't know any of the real names behind the silly usernames.
Noah Hertz:Except David, of course.
David:There's something sort of liberating about the place where it's a place where you can be sort of very authentic, but also there's also this aspect of safety because you could also be anonymous. And it's very rare to find a place where you can be, like you have like an anonymous place where everyone is positive because like the extreme in the other direction is somewhere like 4chan, where it's like everyone's anonymous and everyone's very toxic. It's fundamentally kind of like a Twitter clone. But at the same time, there's a lot of features that are missing, which I am on the fence about whether or not I should implement because it's kind of interesting when they're not there.
Noah Hertz:Maybe the future of the Internet is stuff like David's Social. Hobby is projects so hostile to advertisers and tech moguls that people can just be who they wanna be. There's no concern that a company or a weirdo could buy the site out and change things radically. There's always going to be assholes and Nazis online. I know that.
Noah Hertz:I'm not naive enough to think otherwise, but, frankly, I'm ready to spend my time somewhere I don't have to see them anymore. Do you think David is a platform, whether it's, you know, the way you use it, the way other people use it, do you think it says something about just where Internet and social media are nowadays that a silly little platform like David is just like such a it's such a positive space that you have so much nice things to say
Lily Alexandre:about? Absolutely. I think, the Internet is so centralized now. Everything is 5 websites, and the 5 websites all look the same. Like all the posts look and sound the same because they're all AI generated.
Lily Alexandre:The idea of a scrappy, like a dinky, sometimes glitchy limited little thing, it's human. You know? It reminds us like, yeah, a person made this. This this is not something that is like trying to hijack my attention span. This is something being made like almost as a as a joke or as a gift almost.
Lily Alexandre:I think the love for it comes from a similar places like the love for, Neo cities, if you're familiar. It's just awesome to do a little coding and come up with something that looks funny. And like we all cheer when there's a new feature. It feels like, we are all stakeholders even as this is the world's most centralized social media platform. Just feels specific and personal.
Lily Alexandre:And even if it is not specific to me because my name is Lily, the fact that it is specific to anyone makes me feel like I'm living in the real world with real people.
Noah Hertz:Yeah. Yeah.
Lily Alexandre:Design is powerful, you know? It's not that the people on David are necessarily way better than the people anywhere else. Although, you know, I like them. They're my a lot of them are my friends. It's that the design of the platform encourages pro social behavior.
Lily Alexandre:Like I am sometimes a bit of a jerk on Twitter. I try not to be. I think of myself as a nice person, but it's not necessarily that all the bad people are there, or and all the good people are on David. Like a lot of us are the same people speaking differently for the platform to receive us in the way we want. I love that David is a place where you have to be nice and a little goofy.
Noah Hertz:Yeah. I like that. There's not enough places online where you're supposed to be nice and a little goofy. Yeah.
Lily Alexandre:Yeah. That's it.
Noah Hertz:At time of recording, one of my latest posts on David's social was about deciding what I plan to give my friends as a thanks for playing a role in my wedding. I would not tweet that. Not just because I'd end up with bots hawking crypto scams and porn in my comments, but because I don't feel comfortable sharing personal things on Twitter anymore. My face and the name on my birth certificate are attached to everything I say, and the looming danger of people turning me into a main character to gawk at is always there. But in a small digital community like David Social, I have fun.
Noah Hertz:I know there's a place for the dumb jokes I used to tweet or a place for a digital pat on the back if I need to just vent. I don't know how long it'll be around either. David could wake up tomorrow and decide they're tired of running the place. But, for as long as this fun little corner of the web is around, I'm going to enjoy a place free of advertisers and free of creeps. And then, I guess I'll just find a new one after that.
Mike Rugnetta:Thanks a million to Noah Hertz, whose work you can find at noahertz.com. That's noahertz. Thanks also to David and Lily for talking with us. We're curious about your thoughts. Do you feel like Internet socializing is moving into increasingly limited spaces, to smaller and smaller communities, further and further away from the everything sites and into focused and perhaps even temporary spaces online.
Mike Rugnetta:Tell us what sort of space makes you feel safe enough to share your real feelings online. Call us at 6 5161550007, email us at the never post atgmail.com, or leave us a voice memo. There's a link in the show notes, and your responses may be used in a future Mailbag episode.
Georgia Hampton:God, I really need to do a Trader Joe's run. All I could find in my pantry was this mysterious tray covered in a massive silver cloche that has smoke coming out from under it, and it's like weirdly heavy. Oh, my my god. Mike.
Mike Rugnetta:Hey. Oh, stifling in there.
Georgia Hampton:Oh, Jesus. You really got me worried. You know, I did read in my tarot cards last week that you were going to wind up a decapitated head on a platter. Didn't I Slack you about that? Ugh.
Georgia Hampton:I can't remember. Anyway, while me and my guest have a snack, you wanna close out the episode?
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. I would love to. I can't I can't feel my feet. Is that bad? That's the show that we have for you this week.
Mike Rugnetta:We're gonna be back in the main feed on Wednesday, November 6th. If you wanna help us continue to make the show and get access to our side shows, like posts from the field, slow post, and never watch, alongside extended segments, bonus segments, and an ad free version of the show. You can head over to neverpo.s t to become a member. We would love your support. $7 a month gets you an ad free version of the show.
Mike Rugnetta:$12 a month gets you access to every post on the website, every sideshow, every extended cut with discounts if you sign up for a year. Join us. Join us. Membership. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor, first name, last name.
Mike Rugnetta:Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. And the show's host is Mike Rugnetta, except when I'm under a cloche. When I first dyed, I stole a lock of your hair while you slept. Now I dip it in ink when the mood strikes.
Mike Rugnetta:And the times you visit and kneel so pretty on the grass above me, that's not scratching you here. It's writing. Excerpt of Poem to Line My Casket With, Ramona, by Josh Bell. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure.
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