The Ones Who Paved the Way (A Brief History)
The Predecessors
CompuServe
This is CompuServe. It was the predecessor to the Internet. A catalog of scholarly information and articles, it served faithfully from the 1960’s until the public release of the Internet in the 1990’s. It was also the baseline for social media. While CompuServe did not have features like the chatroom and friend groups, it came with early prototypes of emails, open information, and updatable archives.
Usenet
Next up, we have Usenet. It introduced groups (newsgroups) and live posting. While it still wasn’t true social media, it set the groundwork needed to form platforms like CyWorld (which no longer exists, though a redundant version still exists here) and Facebook (a capture of an older version can be found here). Usenet also paved the path for a more immediate change: the WELL and GEnie.
The WELL and GEnie
GEnie was GE’s (General Electric’s) foray into social media. While, again, this wasn’t a complete social media platform, it was as close as you could get in the 1980's - 1990’s. The WELL was similar to GEnie, though it did not gain as much popularity. Both were made redundant by the rise of the Internet, but you can still see traces of their once revolutionary tactics.
The Palace
Social media isn’t social media without chatrooms, and The Palace brought them to the forefront of the international internet frenzy. The Palace is a chatroom site that allows users to join a “palace,” which is essentially an image with emoji avatars overlaid on top. While The Palace in itself is not meant to be a complete social media site, the groundwork is similar to the group chats that exist today.
Friendster
Freindster was the early predecessor of sites like Facebook and Twitter. The format was extremely similar, and the base it laid for online gaming continues to fuel the scene today.
A First
Six Degrees
When Sixdegrees.com was founded in 1997, its structure resembled that of Facebook and Twitter. You created a profile and interacted with friends and associates. You could post messages and photos, and there was a multi-tier group implementation. It was shut down in 2001, but brought back on. You can find it here.
The Titans (For Now)
The Rise
Facebook and Instagram
Facebook was founded out of a dorm room at Harvard University by Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin. Students could make profiles, post messages, and share photos. It was an immediate hit, gaining one million users by the end of its first year. Due to the overwhelming popularity, Zuckerberg dropped out of college in his sophomore year, and moved his company to Palo Alto, California. Now, Facebook is one of, if not the largest social media site. Currently, Instagram also belongs to Facebook, once again widening Facebook’s reach.
Snapchat
Snapchat is a social media platform that has a unique “disappearing posts” structure. Each post disappears after 10 seconds, although “stories,” “memories,” and “group chats” last up to 24 hours. This business model forces users to come back to the app constantly so that they don’t miss a post from a friend. As expected, with Snapchat passing Facebook and Twitter in stats, most titan companies poached Snap Inc.’s ideas. Instagram copied Snap’s “Story” feature, and Facebook added stickers and filters. Some would argue that it was perfectly legal, and they would be right. Facebook owned a company with the technology and software to create filters and stickers. You can’t copyright a “story” feature, seeing as stories are used everywhere, and the implementation of the feature is too general. But the fact remains that Snapchat had the idea first, and then the giants swooped in and took those ideas.
Reddit, Quora, and Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow
Although Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, and Stack Overflow are not legally related, their structure is similar. They are all question and answer sites, where users are awarded points (Reddit - Karma, Quora - Credits, Stack - Reputation). While these points are entirely useless and carry no use, this system has created quite a large database of solutions to almost every problem. While most of these sites’ reliability is questionable, sites like Stack Overflow, which are for specific academic questions are usually trustworthy. Stack Overflow is for programmers, so the straightforward nature of questions (how do I…, does this…, why…) eliminates any reason to write false or misleading answers (why not just not write an answer?). Those who do write answers care enough to write truthful and useful solutions, which makes the database a treasuretrove of information.
YouTube
YouTube is the most popular site on the internet, with over 1.625 billion searches per month. It is also the second most popular search engine on the web (That’s right! YouTube has so much information that it charts over 60 billion minutes of video to users a day!). YouTube was founded by PayPal employees Jawed Karim, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and sold to Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company) in 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars. There were 31 million channels on the platform in 2019, and that number is probably a lot higher today. Advertising on YouTube allows for any content creator above 1k subscribers to earn $18 per ad view, which means that they earn about 3-5 dollars per video view. This encourages aggressive video uploads, which in turn allows YouTube to charge more per ad, and so on;
The Fall
“When you learn, teach. When you get, give.” -- Maya Angelou.
The concept of social media was founded on the idea of sharing knowledge. The Palace, Friendster, and Six Degrees set the foundation on which the current social media scene was born. Think back to before social media. Imagine telling somebody back then that one day, you would be able to make friends without ever meeting them, use cameras to put virtual filters on your recordings, and exchange information without having to move. They would laugh at you. Call you deranged or a dreamer. It would seem too good to be true! Alas, it was. When Facebook entered the scene, it was a gamechanger. Everyone was on it. Everyone wanted to use it. When the first data breach hit, we brushed it off. Called it a one-time accident. We did the same with charges of corruption. And with the misleading posts. But at this point, we can’t. We need to stop using these platforms. We have to, if we don’t want to plunge our lives downward.
Why We Need to STOP
The Reason
We envisioned a platform where we could meet, make friends, socialize, and learn. We almost got there. We have everything we need, but we have something that we shouldn’t have. Corruption. We have ruined social media. We try to rid our platforms of this sickly virus of corruption, yet we can’t. It is a Sisyphean task to try to get rid of everything that ruins social media! We will get close, only to find ourselves back at the bottom of the hill. The problem does not lie in the platforms, it lies in us. Social media is such a bountiful feeding ground for those who seek to do harm because we have made it one. We mull around these sites, some practically live in them! If we stop, these platforms will no longer be attractive as a base for all this corruption. Some may argue that these bad people will find another place to do harm, and I would see where they were coming from. But we can fight them better out in the world then on the Internet. It's not illegal to tell someone drinking hand-sanitizer is safe in a YouTube video. It can be illegal to tell someone that drinking hand-sanitizer is safe in real life.
Alternatives to Social Media
While simply stopping use of social media would be nice, it's impossible. You cannot simply forget about socializing, and social media is sometimes the only way to socialize. However, there are alternatives. Messaging, emails, and closed group chats aren’t corrupt. Talking with your friends that way is perfectly fine. Academic information sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Stack are all salvageable. While these platforms are susceptible, we find that they are less polluted. To make friends, in situations where going out is not an option, we can rebuild platforms like Facebook. We can make them exactly that: a book of faces. A list of profiles would allow people to find matches from their interests and contact information could be distributed at the discretion of the person.
Comments