A popular online friend of mine posted an essay on his blocking policy, which boils down to “Block freely, quickly, and remorselessly.” Basically, if you’re irritating him, even if you’re well-intentioned, you get the block - see ya! Life’s too short to deal with people who annoy you.
Here’s the thing: I agree with him.
Yet whenever I say you should block at will, the same dreary argument raises its head: "Blocking everyone means you just build an echo chamber! Social media is supposed to be social - blocking is for cowards!”
Here’s the thing: I agree with them.
Because we’re not talking about the same social media.
The insidious thing about social media is that it all looks like the same experience when it’s not. If you’re reading an essay someone wrote in a national newspaper, you know that newspaper has thousands of readers - so you expect some cranks in the comments. But if you read your slam poetry at a coffee shop, you’re not expecting hundreds of protesters to barge through the door.
Most real-life communication comes with some understanding of the audience the average user can expect to reach.
Social media does not.
And the big problem with social media is that people log in and go “Well, this is what social media is like.” Except it isn’t; the audience you have affects the experience you have so intensely that past a certain number of people, you’re not even living in the same virtual neighborhood.
So. Let’s discuss what you can talk about and what sorts of “social” experience you can have at every level of social media.
(CAVEAT: This all assumes you’re posting regularly - maybe one or two posts a day, plus a handful of comments on other people’s stuff. If you post sporadically, you may drop down a level or two. Also, it’s possible to buy followers, but we’re not talking about buying yourself some bots.)
You Have An Audience of 5 People.
Welcome to the lonely, remote island of Outpost Five.
At this level, your social media is… well, probably not that social. If you’re lucky you have that one friend who comments on everything you do, but realistically most of your thoughts are little more than a private diary.
Social media at this level is disheartening - which is why every network worth its salt dedicates itself to getting you more friends right away. Give us your phone contacts! Let us harvest names from your other social networks! Here’s a list of people to follow, God, please, hit that subscribe button!
The good news is that social media at this stunted level is trivially easy to manage. Nobody’s saying anything offensive to you except maybe for spambots. Doesn’t matter how good or bad your posts are; nobody’s listening.
Those who claim that “Social media should be social” are correct here, because for most people this experience is a failure state.
You Have An Audience of 50 People.
Good news! You have moved into the tiny hamlet of Fiftyshire. You can post something good and get one or two comments. You feel seen, which is the nice bit about being on social media. And these fifty people are generally hand-chosen - your family, your friends, maybe a couple of celebrities you like - so the chances of running into someone really awful are low…
But not nil. We all have that one relative who’s addicted to the wrong news sources and likes getting into arguments online. But it’s just the one crank, right? You can tolerate your whackadoodle cousin causing a ruckus in your comments every six months or so because it’s honestly more trouble to unfriend him - and it feels uncharitable. He’s one of a handful of folks who are part of your circle, and shouldn’t you give him space?
I mean, you can create an echo chamber in Fiftyshire by blocking any dissenters. This shrinks your information circle. That’s bad.
Because realistically? At this level there’s one, maybe two, stupid opinions you have to see - and not regularly. That’s not bad! Sometimes you stumble across some legitimate gripe they have, and your worldview is expanded. That’s a net positive!
But when you say something stupid, people just scroll past for the same reason you scroll past your cousin’s anti-vaccine rants. This is a peaceful town, stranger; in Fiftyshire, we live and let live.
You Have An Audience of 500 People.
Dunbar’s Number states that you can only maintain a list of about 150 people who, and I quote, “you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”
At 500, you’re well above that.
You’re still friendly with people, but your social connections are a more stretched. You’ve likely got more celebrities on there, and more tenuous connections - acquaintances from that writers’ group you keep meaning to get back to, that one girl you drunkenly exchanged social media with at a bar but she posts good pictures of her trips to France.
Occasionally you find someone who you wonder why you’re still following them because oh my God, the stuff they post….
But Fivehundredville is still a peaceable town. Mostly.
But at 500, your looser vetting standards means that things slip through the cracks. You’re more likely to offend someone - and that offended person can leave a comment that attracts other angry, like-minded commenters you don’t know.
You’re still not obliged to have flame wars every day - but you sure can if you want in Fivehundredville! - but you’ve started to understand there’s some level of management involved.
That management can take many forms: you be more careful about what you post because Aunt Gladys is watching, or you block a few select people who really get out of line (poor Aunt Gladys), or you adopt a brusque “I am who I am and I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks.”
But even the “I don’t care” is a strategy you’re adopting, whether you realize it or not.
Still, though, 500 people is fun! You’re talking with people, you’re staying in touch with folks you normally wouldn’t have remembered, you’re waking to one or two comments on most posts and maybe twenty comments if you hit the jackpot - this is nice.
What’s that? You want more of a celebrity experience? Well, you can try to upgrade yourself to:
You Have An Audience of 5,000 People.
That’s crazy, isn’t it? It’s more people than your high school, all following you!
When you’re in Fiftyshire, Fivethousand City seems like an impossible dream.
But it’s not that hard to achieve, particularly over time… if you focus on getting there. Friend a lot of people, devote time to crafting a fun experience (f’r example by, say, writing a bullshit essay on the various levels of social media), spend your days chatting and posting and commenting, and five thousand is a very reasonable goal.
…or you can get there accidentally by just having an interesting life. Maybe you circulate a lot in real life! Maybe you’re pretty and you post sexy pictures! Maybe you’ve got a lot of know-how about Legos and are willing to share it! Plenty of folks put up stakes in Fivethousand City without even really intending to.
And it’s nice living there. People know your name. When you post, you get tens of comments on the regular. You’re not famous or anything and it’d be the purest act of ego to claim you were - but you’re a kind of somebody in this little internet backwater. You even have low-level fans, folks who are happy whenever you post because it brings them joy.
But like every big city, Fivethousand City has good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods. Do you live in Fivethousand City because you post plant pictures and never discuss current events? You’re in the chi-chi part of town. Are you a woman who posts about politics? Whoo, you are from the streets.
Still, living in the big city is pretty normal most of the time. But every once in a while something weird happens….
You stumble across a discussion of people you don’t know discussing how you’re a friend collector. How you only post those pretty pictures for the attention. How you actually don’t know jack about Legos, you’re just a poser trying to distract from the real Lego heroes.
Someone, possibly even someone you’re online buds with, mentions that they’re afraid of giving you feedback. Which is weird, you’re just some schmuck, but they perceive you as holding real power.
During a polite debate, you leave a disagreeing comment on a friend’s post - and people following you take it way more seriously than you, flood into the discussion, and start a flame war with someone you like in your name.
You make a post you didn’t think of as particularly controversial that goes viral, getting magnitudes more attention than you usually do - and it attracts the attention of some larger group that thinks your noncontroversial post is seriously controversial. You have to deal with a swarm of nasty comments for a few days until it passes.
You make a toss-off post that probably could have been phrased better, one where your good friends would have shrugged and knew what you meant. But it ends up in a flame war because that post gets presented to people who don’t have any good will towards you, and seem weirdly obsessed with getting mad at you because you didn’t use the perfect words.
You make a post that is phrased perfectly, yet have some stranger barging in to tell you how you hate waffles.
These aren’t regular occurrences, mind you, just weird glitches you see every couple of months. And remember, Fivethousand City has good and bad neighborhoods! Maybe you live in Fivethousand City for decades and never run across any of ‘em.
Yet these things do happen - that’s life in the big city! And it means that sometimes you do big city things - rereading to spot potential outrages before you hit post, DMing friends instead of calling them out publicly.
These are behaviors that people in gentle Fiftyshire don’t understand. They never have to worry about the city things - heck, they never even realize those things exist.
But you do.
You Have An Audience of 50,000 People.
Hey, remember those little things that happened occasionally in Fivethousand City?
In Fiftythousand Metropolis, they happen monthly. Maybe weekly if you’re living in a bad neighborhood.
And when those events happen so regularly, you start to see patterns.
You can’t possibly keep track of everyone following you, but you do get to know the archetypes. And like a bartender clocking the hidden belligerence of the guy who’s about to start a fistfight, you start to understand which people are here to drink and socialize, and which people are here to stir shit up. (Or, if you’re posting sexy pictures, which people are only being nice so they can take you home.)
The truth is, there’s only so many things that can be said about anything you post, and after a while you can largely predict what will be said - in part because you’ve dealt with enough waffle-guys and bad-faith interpretations of your work that you’ve learned how to put on a public appearance. That doesn’t mean you don’t like people, because a lot of those archetypes are fun to hang with!
But the ones who aren’t fun, well… After a while, they’re mostly predictable. You probably began with good-faith rebuttals, having long, spiraling conversations with them that went nowhere - but after years of living in the grime of Fiftythousand Metropolis, you realize that engaging with a certain sort of commenter has a 98% chance of leading nowhere.
Why bother? When I say “Block at will,” it’s because your Spider-Sense has been primed.
And the folks who say “If you block people you’ll create a echo chamber!” simply do not recognize how things work in Fiftythousand Metropolis. I’ve blocked literally hundreds of incels in my time, yet if I write an essay decrying them that gets popular in any way, I will have some more incels.
I literally can’t not hear the moaning of the incels.
You can erect a workable echo chamber in Fiftyshire, which I agree would be bad… but in Fiftythousand Metropolis, dissenting voices are a fungible commodity that will arrive regardless of the barriers you create. (Note, however, that “having all those voices yelling at you” is extremely different than “I listen to them,” as witness one Ms. J.R.R. Rowling.)
Weirder still: Super Eyepatch Wolf (a great YouTuber who lives in the big city of a million-plus subscriber) has a theory:
For every hundred people who follow you, you acquire one dedicated person who hates you.
Not a problem in Fiftyshire; you may not even have that guy. And not a problem in Fivehundredville; five people who hate you, that’s easy to shrug off. Even in Fivethousand City, sure, fifty haters can get nasty at times, but it’s manageable.
At 50,000, now you’ve got enough haters to fill a Discord to brimming. They cease being isolated individuals and form groups - groups that are bonded by their loathing of you.
And sometimes they actively work to drag you down.
Now, I think the hater-number is probably closer to 1 in 500 people, maybe 1 in a 1000, which gets a little more manageable. And again, it depends on your neighborhood; a famous queer political poster is gonna get more haters than a famous glassblower.
Regardless: in Fiftythousand Metropolis, if you’re unlucky, you may genuinely have a large group of people who are a) out to get you and b) organized.
And the people in Fiftyshire are not going to understand that, because that’s not their experience.
But for you, the experience you used to have in Fiftyshire completely breaks down. You need to block people, because some of those haters will dedicate a day to ruining your life. You posting daily can lead to shitstorms if you don’t modulate what and how you post.
But don’t complain! Nobody sympathizes, because to get to 50,000 you had to work for it. So any problems you have living here are entirely your fault. Discussing how to manage the group of people who may or may not be trying to drive you to suicide is being ungrateful.
But hey. At least you’re not in:
You Have An Audience of 500,000 People.
“Social media is supposed to be social,” sneers the person from Fivehundred City.
But what they never seem to notice is that past a certain point, the social nature stops. Folks at the 500k level can’t interact with everyone, even if they wanted to.
So do the folks at the 500k level block anyone? No. They barely acknowledge them. This isn’t social media as anyone in Fiftyshire or even in Fiftythousand Metropolis understands it; you’ve catapulted out of human capacity.
Most of those accounts tend to be glorified marketing feeds, because they can’t be anything else. And the comment sections tend to be seething cesspools of mania because unless they feel like hiring a couple of full-time mods to instill sanity, it’s easier to just let whatever weirdnesses fester.
Now, if you want to make posting here a full-time job, you can - certain Twitter-owners do it, as does the President, which is my personal proof that both of them have too much free time on their hands. But it’s still gonna be a lot of ignoring folks - and mostly interacting with a tight group of known folks.
God knows what the haters can do now. They may actually drive you to self-harm if you can’t shut them out properly. It’s definitely happened before and will happen again.
Dunbar’s Number, if you’ll recall, says you can comfortably have about 150 friends. 500k is so far beyond our monkey brain capacity it is in outer space.
What’s it like here? Beyond the external signals I can see, I have no idea. I’ve never lived here. But I’ve talked to folks who do - and when they tried to explain what their social media experience was like to me, it was like me explaining to a happy Fiftyshire resident what Fiftythousand Metropolis is like.
So What Do We Do?
We hope someone builds a better social media, is what we do. I’m sure someone will figure this out some day, and when they do it’ll be bigger than Facebook.
But in the meantime…
Whenever a metadiscussion arises on “How to handle your social media,” understand that the experiences differ.
For example: There’s a constant debate on FetLife (basically a kinky Facebook) about needing better tools for blocking harassers, particularly for attractive women with large audiences. And clueless folks from Fiftyshire keep saying, “Just block them one by one, it’s not difficult!”
It may not be difficult, but it is tedious. And someone in a bad neighborhood in Fivethousand City might have to block four or five people a week - after they see the disgusting messages that these idiots sent.
Does this sound like fun? Because the point of social media should be having fun. If you’re forcing people to interact with slimeballs on the regular, well, many of them simply will not. And that’s a loss.
Like I said. I don’t really have solutions. I personally think the sweet spot for social media is somewhere between Fivehundredville and Fivethousand City; it’s why I’ve purposely not tried to promote my BlueSky account. And on the social networks where I have more followers than that, well, I often envy the folks who have fewer. Because their experience is, in a lot of ways, a lot more quality than anything I experience on the larger networks.
Fivehundredville is a pretty good place to live. I grew up there. I miss it.
If you’re there, treasure the experience. Just… be a little less provincial.
In other news, my book The Cathedral of Portals is out and free to read, a chapter at a time. It’s approaching the end of Act One, where the three storylines finally converge - so if you haven’t checked it out and you’re new here, give it a shot!
There’s three ways to read it:
FOR FREE, a chapter at a time: At Royal Road, we’re on Chapter 20 - where a ragged family of portal-makers are trying desperately to survive in frigid mountaintops, leading one of the most eventful moments in the entire book.
PAID, a chapter at a time: A paid level at my Patreon. We’re on Chapter 22 - where Philothea, who’s just been given control of their own town, deals with a threat that may destroy everyone in Treva.
PAID, all at once: Pre-order the book at Amazon for its final publication on October 30th.