As we move to destroy monopolist walled-garden “web” vampires (don’t worry, we win in the end), we can and should meanwhile use their constraints to benefit ourselves and one another.

Here are some social media platform constraints and how we might get value from them.

First, Twitter: 280 characters is a helpful constraint for writing, even long(ish)form threads, where each section needs to stand alone and contribute to the larger idea.

Also cool about threads: reference/discovery via different “entry points.”

At the moment, all of these microblog posts are started as Twitter threads, composed in Roam using the character limit feature. I try to keep them all at 13 tweets or fewer.

Twitter also seems to be the absolute best place ever created for finding people with similar interests, no matter how niche.

Keep the original text of any tweets you care about in data that you own like a @microdotblog or your @RoamResearch graph.

The most important constraint of Twitter (that applies equally to all of these “platforms”): It’s a trash heap owned by someone who doesn’t care about you. Nothing in it matters other than being a decent human being.

To be clear: All of these platforms are owned by nihilists.

The social media companies would feed your children to piranhas if they thought it would improve Engagement™.

Don’t hang ANYTHING important on your identity as expressed through one of these platforms. It doesn’t belong to you, nor will it ever be offered for sale (to you).

A core principle in using all of these vampire platforms: As long as you’re having fun and keeping ownership of anything valuable you create, you can’t do it wrong. Use these dystopian hellscape fiefdoms as your personal playgrounds. Never take them seriously, even for a second.

Facebook Groups can be useful for finding people around a specific topic (because all forum software has failed), but for publishing, Facebook is likely the worst product ever created by mankind. Get your relationships off Facebook and into a Personal Email Newsletter (PEN).

Instagram: Nearly completely worthless. This is a company that hates photography and photographers. They mangle every photo you take and don’t even let you leverage their platform for a single good or healthy thing for yourself. They should be the first to be thrown into a fire.

That said, Instagram groupings of 10 photos (all at the same aspect ratio 🤦‍♂️ and mangled to hell by a company who hates photography) can help you edit.

Keep photos in similar groupings in Photos/Lightroom while we wait for someone to (finally) create good photo hosting.

YouTube might be the most problematic of all of the platforms precisely because it’s the one that seems to provide the most value to its meat I mean users. It got here by way of the accident of file sizes/hosting costs. Thank God podcasts skated in under the copper limbo wire.

YouTube is the most entrenched monopoly of all the vampires. I need to think more on it, but right now I think it should just be treated as Twitter for video. Always have a version NOT for YouTube, without “like/subscribe” garbage, unless it’s something you don’t care about.

I don’t have much to say about TikTok. It’s just videos of arbitrary length/orientation/aspect ratio. If you want to tell stories/jokes concisely, TikTok is great for experimenting, but you should own those videos and put them anywhere you like.

TikTok should be algorithm-only.

I’m not a gamer, so I have little to say about streaming at the moment, but I’m testing it out over the coming weeks with some filmmaking in virtual reality.

Snapchat/Instagram Stories/Facebook Stories/Fleets: These I find really interesting, because the impetus to share a moment from your day that self-destructs might in fact be a most excellent prompt for JOURNALING. I’m in favor of journaling, no matter the form, but save every little moment in your own place too.

I’m very curious what other value people think we can get from using these platforms while we haven’t yet successfully destroyed them (trust that we will, oh yes, they are nothing but paper tigers, every one of them).

I’m very curious what other value people think we can get from using these platforms while we haven’t yet successfully destroyed them (trust that we will, oh yes, they are nothing but paper tigers, every one of them).