down in the posting mines / poking at ghosts

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hi!

Hello! I’ve been sleeping so badly this week, oh my god. I often write my weekly essay in advance then add the intro on the day so truly I cannot make any promises, wrt the quality of at least half of what follows. I know it’s a solid idea but can I put it into words in a way that makes sense? Only one way to find out!

Before I do that though, I’d like to thank everyone who took advantage of the flash sale last week and shelled out for a paying subscription to this Substack. It was very nice of you and I appreciate it a lot. I suspect you already know this, but there are also 15 months’ worth of archives on here, if you want to really get some bang for your buck.

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Anyway! We were talking about social media on Bluesky yesterday - you really should join Bluesky if you still haven’t, by the way - and I think I ended up stumbling into a half-decent theory on why social media platforms work or fail. I call it the Posting Middle Classes Theory.

It began forming when I tried to think about why Threads had been such a flop, despite being owned by Meta and them making it incredibly easy to create an account via Instagram. I’ve never actually used Threads myself but am told that its main problem is the algorithmic timeline, which you can’t turn off and which just isn’t very good.

Now, it’s not hard to understand why Meta decided that the algorithm had to be non-negotiable on its new platform. One: people who aren’t very online are unlikely to spend hours and days perfectly curating their timelines, and going through a remarkable amount of effort to organically find hundreds of accounts they may wish to follow. Pushing posts and people they may find interesting onto their timelines is good, because it will make it easy for them to get hooked.

Two: people and companies with very large accounts elsewhere - mostly brands, influencers and celebrities - also benefit from the algorithm. It means that their content can be pushed towards their preferred audience, without them having to do all the work themselves. To be blunt, it also means that their content doesn’t need to be extremely good, because organic reach isn’t the name of the game. They can post some half-decent slop and, thanks to Meta, the people in need of half-decent slop to scroll past will follow them. Everyone’s a winner!

Well, that was the hope anyway. The reason it failed, I think is that Meta forgot to take the posting middle classes into consideration. How to define the PMCs? Well, it’s reasonably easy. As I see it, the vast majority of them have, say, over 5,000 followers, but under 150,000. They didn’t gain that following because they were very famous or very important offline, or away from social media.

Crucially, though, what defines a member of the posting middle class is their love of the game. They don’t post because they’re trying to sell a product, or solely to advance their career. They don’t post to advertise themselves or their company. They post because they must. There’s something fundamentally wrong with them and the worms in their brain makes them spend entire days posting away on the computer.

Well I say “they” but I really ought to be using “we” here, seeing as I am a proud member of this internet-diseased class. I have a bunch of followers on various platforms and, for the most part, that’s because I love to post. I love it! It’s got me in trouble more times than I can count but I still couldn’t stop it if I tried. I love posting and I love reading posts and replying to posts, I love my friends who live in my phone and whose first names I’m only 40% sure I actually know.

Though I realise that no-one died and made me king of the posting middle classes, I would like to argue that we - my people and I - are the ones keeping social media platforms running. A-list celebrities may be shiny and able to rustle up a lot of engagement when they do decide to wade in, but we’re the ones doing all those long shifts at the posting factory, making sure that all those lurkers have something to read when they’re bored at work.

We’re the ones discussing the news and making stupid jokes, and we take turns accidentally becoming main characters for the day because we either said something unexpectedly clever or unexpectedly stupid. There cannot be written social media without us, because we provide the content.

That’s a problem for the large companies who run these platforms, because our demands are often at odds with the ones of the people at the top and at the bottom. We don’t want algorithmic feeds, because that would mean not keeping up with the news or the latest discourse, and we want to keep track of what our friends are up to in real time. We don’t want the settings to be tinkered with every other week because by god, we’ll notice, and it’ll annoy us. We don’t want, say, people with paid accounts getting prioritised in the replies because what we like is quality content that is easily accessible.

The tension here is that our requests are largely seen as hard to accommodate by the people running the apps - Bluesky excluded - as what they want is to make money, and our way of doing things doesn’t do that. What the failure of Threads has proved, however, is that they do need to cater to us as otherwise their platforms will fail. Instagram and TikTok work because they’re about images and videos but, when it comes to text, the freaks and weirdos are the ones holding the whole edifice together.

Of course, it is possible to do as Twitter did, namely to get us hooked then, Sugababes style, change the rules of engagement one by one hoping we don’t notice, but that takes time. Meta decided to try and ignore the posting middle classes from the very beginning and as a result it fell flat on its face. It is true that people who aren’t very online represent the majority of social media users, but they wouldn’t be social media users in the first place if it weren’t for us.

So, in short: ignore posters at your peril.