I think that platform is called "the rest of the human experience outside of the Internet".

Invite some friends over, hang out at a park, go to a bar, throw a party, attend church, join a club, play a sport.

Internet itself isn't the problem. You could organize all of those IRL get-togethers using email. Influencer culture isn't a problem that effects email. Similarly, you can use discord, zoom, skype, IRC, SMS... all of these are broadly free of influencer culture.

Influencer culture is something that emerges on a particular sort of internet communication; mostly on the commercial platforms that specialize in asymmetric communication (where a few people produce and the majority consume.) To keep the consuming majority engaged, these platforms constantly recommend they follow the producing minority. Influencer culture is an inevitable consequence of this dynamic.

Good observation!

I suspect that we ourselves are partially to blame here.

Influencer culture isn't a problem on email, IRC, etc. because when we use those we expect ourselves to be active participants. We take for granted that we have to show up and provide something of interest to the others in the forum.

But when we go on Twitter, YouTube, etc. we expect to just mindlessly consume content without giving anything back. That creates an attentional vacuum where everyone wants to consume and no one wants to produce. Influencers fill that vacuum because no one else does.

In other words, email is like a potluck dinner and we would feel rude walking in without a dish. Other asymmetric social media is like a free picnic where everyone shows up empty handed and ends up eating from the giant tub of fries that McDonald's brought as a marketing campaign because, well, what else is there?

So maybe the trick is to avoid communities that you don't contribute to.

It seems interesting if it's possible to do those things "offline" without them getting taken over by "hustle", but not online.

Like, at a bar, club, or sporting event in "real life", you might occasionally run into a finbro trying to talk to you about crypto, but it's not the dominant experience.

But is there no way to do the equivalent things online (and there's no obvious reason there shouldn't be an online equivalent to a party or club or even sports league) without it being taken over by people who are there only to build their hustle?

The reason it's so prevalent online is because those people are gaming the system to appear prevalent. They talk up themselves and their brand/product to get likes, follows, and "engagement", which the social media algorithms use to rank and display content.

"Real life" doesn't have an algorithm that is so easily gamed, but there are still ways to "game" it. Going to popular locations (e.g. bars), looking presentable/knowledgeable, social engineering, buying advertisements, setting up seminars, etc. But in real life a lot of these are much easier to avoid because there's simply so much more to life that drowns them out. Real life doesn't have a front page that tells you what the most popular person said today -- that is the function of social media (or newspapers).

Of course, social media platforms could be built that don't prioritize content this way, either by using more complicated algorithms that are less easily gameified, or simpler algorithms that cannot be gamified (e.g. simple chronological ranking), or letting the user have more control over the ranking algorithm. But there is currently no simple market incentive for doing so.

That said, I could totally see that shifting even in the coming decade. I think people are getting tired of being advertised to, and transparently being treated as second-class citizen on these platforms. I could see a "premium" alternative to Facebook/Twitter becoming popular, with a small monthly subscription fee in exchange for much more user control and user-centric design.

Of course, more user control means more opportunities for filter bubbles and cultural fragmentation, which as we've seen are pretty bad for democracy. I suppose there is no easy solution to anything.

Sure there is. There are probably millions of Discord servers used by small groups of people for a common purpose. Same thing with Mastodon instances and subreddits. You don't hear about them because they're not trying to take over the world or build some huge platform. They're just groups of people that want to hang out with each other.

It's definitely possible to find the same thing online. Most of the online spaces I hang out in aren't like that: here, the various subreddits I joined, my fairly carefully culled Twitter feed, etc.

Have you ever played online team games? I've played both offline and online games quite a lot and at least here in Sweden I feel it's quite similar.

I certainly agree with that, but also, isn't this the sort of communication that the Internet was built for? What if you live in the middle of nowhere and you want to chat with someone about something none of your neighbors are into? I feel like 20 years ago the Internet was great at this in text form.

One thing I remember was that discoverability was really difficult in Clubhouse. You could pick as many interests as you like, but it seemed like the feed would still spam you with a lot of stuff disconnected from your interests. When you found a good room, there was no way of following it for the next time it was open. Once it closed down, it was gone.

It's a shame, because there were some very interesting rooms with good conversations. It's just that it became a chore to have to sift through all the garbage to find them.

For everyone saying "why not just go out in real life?", that's not really an option if I'm cleaning the house for an hour, while clubhouse is. Also, some of those conversations (biologists discussing trends in the field with other biologists) aren't ones that are easy to just call up a few of your buddies to get.

Join the Fediverse. Most people there have no interest in mainstream culture and none of the software is built in a way to gamify engagement.

I keep thinking of putting together a bridge between twitter and my mastodon server, but I am always postponing it because it feels wrong.

But that's an artifact of the groups of people that self-select onto that platform, not a property of the platform or its incentives itself. If it became as popular as other platforms it would attract people with similar goals as are on other platforms. The technology isn't intentionally designed to reward them, but they will still find rewards and pursue them if it is their best option.

Not necessarily.

Mastodon, Pleroma and Pixelfed intentionally lack features that would be geared for influencers. Mastodon has no "quote tweet" to avoid having people taking conversations out of context. Pixelfed even has admin-controlled options to disable "likes" and display of counts altogether.

The clients, having no "algorithm" beyond basic chronological sort, make it hard for influencers to game the system. And it wouldn't be too difficult to have an instance where users have limited follower counts to keep the conversation more personal.

Chronological order makes it incredibly easy for "influencers" to game the system. Just post a lot. The system that's hardest to game is the one with the most reliance on algorithms, TikTok. On TikTok, you don't go viral because of some mechanical effect where >1/n people retweet you to their n-sized audience or anything like that, you go viral because the algorithm showed your video to random people and enough of them liked it that the algorithm realized your video is the one that some particular subgroup is most likely to enjoy. (Sorry for the run-on sentence.)

On TikTok you don't have to post every day to "grow an audience", you have to post literally one good video, and if it's really good, it'll get 200k likes by the next morning even if it's the first thing you've ever posted. I think that also leads to a reduction in "hustle culture" – if you post something on YouTube most likely no one will ever see it no matter how great it is. But if you post something on TikTok and it's good, people will see it, and so that obviously creates a much stronger motivation to produce rather than to consume.

> if you post something on TikTok and it's good, people will see it, and so that obviously creates a much stronger motivation to produce rather than to consume.

You took one part of my comment and missed all the other, more important parts where we were discussing about a platform people can have "closer" conversations.

My whole argument about the Fediverse is that (most) people are not looking for extrinsic motivation to produce. I've seen very little people worrying about "going viral" and like I said the systems are mostly designed to discourage these things. Having someone "posting a lot" will quickly be seen as a nuisance and people will stop following them, or get outright blocked.

> But that's an artifact of the groups of people that self-select onto that platform, not a property of the platform or its incentives itself.

the Fediverse is _incredibly_ heterogeneous. pick any two distant corners of it and often they'll be completely unaware that the other corner even exists. the platform allows for different cultures like this and the tooling is such that i _think_ this will remain true as it grows (admins can and do "defederate" with communities whose presence makes the experience worse for them, and as sibling points out there's far less algorithmic-driven content).

so i'm receptive to the idea that a long-term fix for influencer culture -- for those who want to avoid it -- really can be found there, simply because it allows for so much self-sorting. influencer culture might very well still exist, but just like every other culture on the platform it'll be concentrated only to specific corners of the Fediverse.

Any idea how does that work in practice? Seems to me like an unresolvable problem, granted I haven't given it much thought.

If users are identifyable, cross-platform self-promotion is inevitable, it's kind of human nature. If users are anon, content is not curatable and quality is unlikely.

I think Twitter Spaces is pretty decent FWIW. Communities already exist around certain topics, there's plenty of subcultures on Twitter. And the platform is already reputation-centric, you can make of it what you will by following appropriate people. So if a reputable person organizes (and curates speakers in) a Space for a given topic, it can make for decent conversations to tune it. Seems kind of as good as anon voice-chatrooms can get.

It's not audio, but the Fediverse gives me that as an alternative to influencer centric networks (in particular twitter).

As an alternative to instagram, there is Pixelfed, which integrates with all the other servers such as Mastodon or Pleroma.

Online mediums that do one-on-one conversations (instant messaging, etc) or small group chats of people who know each other don't have this issue, but they're also pretty limiting for meeting new people. It seems like there's a trade-off between a platform making it easy to discover new people versus a platform fostering conversations between invested people participating equally. The largest social platforms have been the ones that are better on the discover-new-people side while doing worse on the other side.

I feel like discord is pretty good at this.

How about a service I can pay for that blocks/mutes for me anyone that’s ever had a Clubhouse account, on all platforms?

I'd pay for that.

I am building a platform like this. Also, you could try out Lunchclub.

it's called a dinner party. you essentially can't have this "at scale" without creating the incentives leading to the contentification of it.