Human-Scale Social Networks
Sean Moore
Two’s a crowd. Three’s a company. And ten million is a nightmare.
I was introduced to Twitter three times. I parted with it three times, too.
The first time, I came to it far too early. Before I had any interest in social networks outside of where I sat in the cafeteria for my half-hour of freedom (high school, sadly – not prison). I was part of a quickly growing minority of people at my school who didn’t have a Facebook or a MySpace page; there just wasn’t any appeal to cataloguing my life, to subject my internet self to the silly dramas of high-school triviality.
Had my interests then been what they are now, I probably would’ve made a lot more sense of what was going on. But they weren’t, and it didn’t – I looked, didn’t understand what I saw, and I left, without giving any of it a try.
The second time, I was beginning to be much more internet-savvy – in college now, an engineer, finally exposed to programming that didn’t involve a calculator or a spreadsheet. A little more social-network aware, too – finally, said all of my friends, when I got a Facebook account a week before I left for University. Curious, I actually signed up this time, started following people. And I still didn’t get it. The brevity, the subject matter, just the idea of sharing tiny little snippets of your life still didn’t make sense to me. Less than a week, and I walked away again.
The third time wasn’t even more recent. An avid follower of technology now, the service was constantly coming up in RSS feeds, blog posts, tech sites. Always a little bit of irony when I read about how Twitter was making RSS ‘obsolete’, through my newsreader of some techwriter’s feed. Twitter was the future now, and I was certainly showing up late. So I tried again, this time following the writers I followed as a reader, trying to use the service as they did. And still it didn’t make sense to me. It was just too much, too noisy, too big. So I mostly left, only checking in from time to time if I was looking for something interesting to read that I had missed elsewhere.
Perhaps my experience is dissimilar to most. Twitter never appealed to me as a place to have a conversation, because the people having them weren’t my friends, and the conversations I was having weren’t interesting. And now, I’m not the type who’s interested in sitting, mouth agape, watching uninteresting posts from celebrities flutter by, or trying to make the same lame joke as ten million other people about the most recent happening.
But there’s something bigger there, too, something beyond just that lack of acceptance. A much more relatable feeling: existing in something too big, and just not fitting in.
Capturing the world’s attention is admirable. If you want to make it in this kind of showbiz, you have to aim at least that high, or nobody, and certainly no one holding the purse strings that you’re batting your eyelashes at, will give a shit. Go big or go home, baby.
There’s a pretty serious stigma to being small. Small size means small growth. Small growth means small value. Small value means small-time money. Small-time money means small-time existence. The half-life for small on the Internet is getting increasingly… smaller.
Small has such a negative connotation, in fact, that I’d offer up an alternative naming: human-scale. That’s a bit more faithful to the intent, really. Something that is approachable, understandable, and digestible by our brains without fancy analytics, Klout scores, or branding mark-up.
It’s true that a lot of things can’t exist at a human-scale: you can’t swim in the same circle as the president, or your favorite hollywood actor, nor can you cram your head full of what is happening in the world in 140-character bites. But a lot of things can only exist at this human scale. Conversations work great with one person, can accommodate a handful, and really start to break down when ten million people join in. Relationships are even harder to scale – they all but collapse when they get bigger than two.
There is something admirable in being small, something human-scale. Not to VCs and investors and stockbrokers, sure; but admirable to the people you build it for. Those people, the ones holding the conversations, forging the relationships, only exist at a human-scale. And really, we all do.
Here’s something that might’ve crossed your mind, savvy reader you:
*why can’t we Internet-scale the human-scale? *
That’s an interesting thought, buried some 800-words already, and probably lost to the goldfish attention span of ordinary web citizens, but I like to reward patience, occasionally.
Where was I? Ah yes, an intriguing concept. Take this massive, overloading, circuit-shorting monolithic omnipresence and put constraints on it, shrink it down. A network for your closest of friends, a little microcosm. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is; it’s been done already, and it’s called Path – a good sign, if someone else was smart enough to found it, and some more someones were curious enough to fund it.
That sounds like the best of both worlds. The human-scale that people crave, the small, the space limiting enough to build up real communication, friendship, intimacy. The Internet-scale that investors crave, growth, growth, GROWTH, hockey-stick line chart and a fairy-tale IPO.
If it hasn’t clicked yet, I’ll make the contrast explicit: these are two diametrically opposed ideas. A design choice favoring one – no matter how small, how inconsequential – does so at detriment to the other. They’re compromised, they’re in conflict, and when it’s decision time, who do you think will win that argument?
The only way to get your human-scale network is to have a human-scale business. And who gives a shit about your human-scale problems when there’s Internet money to be made?
An App.net Epilogue
If there’s a happy ending to this long-winded story, App.net may be it, for me at least. The service is human-scale funded, by the people who use it. The conversations, the relationships, are human scale, too, and there’s nothing that feels like celebrity-acolyte interaction. In a sense, everyone there has put their money where their mouth is, that human-scale can and must work.
I certainly won’t speak for Dalton, or Berg; it could be that their ambition is to make App.net Internet-scale. But right now, it feels human-scale. And until that changes, I won’t be leaving.