In addition to a lot of self-adulation – “I love humanity” – Elon Musk promised in an open letter that everything will be fine under his leadership. After the playful plutocrat finally took over the news platform, the comment section under the tweet still has an apocalyptic mood. Some want to migrate to the open source alternative Mastodon. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales brought his project wt.social into play directly under the Musk tweet. Everything should get better there, but unfortunately the project has not yet been fully developed and asks for donations before you can participate.
Whether platforms like these solve Twitter’s problems also depends on what the diagnosis actually is. If you think annoying advertising alone is the problem, the alternative offer may even suffice. But when it comes to the fellow users, the hostility, the anger, the bullying that constitutes a lot of the content, then probably not.
“As a war of all against all” Thomas Hobbes described the supposed natural state of man. And hardly anywhere else is this thesis confirmed as well as on social media, in this case Twitter. If you look at the unwritten social code of the short message platform through anthropologist glasses, you see a kind of feudal society in which all interactions can more or less be reduced to declarations of solidarity or bickering.
The Geneva app is becoming increasingly popular, especially among young women
Pair a reinforcement algorithm with a platform that incentivizes and rewards extreme and public knee-jerk reactions, and it’s no wonder people’s behavior spirals out of control. In order to be able to continue to move in such a space without being constantly drawn into conflicts, you have to acquire a whole arsenal of behaviors, some of which are passive-aggressive: ghosting, blocking and muting, limiting possible responses.
Churning to another social platform will not protect users from this dynamic. Some things may just be inherent in a medium where brawling has become a spectator sport. But if the user experience sucks anyway, why would you want to replicate it elsewhere and under new management? Maybe social platforms need a general rethink. The app shows how things can be done differently Genevawhich has recently become increasingly popular, especially among young women.
The goal is to build a new kind of online community that isn’t dictated by follower numbers, but is rooted in conversations between people who share interests. Every user can create a so-called home: a virtual sanctuary in which you have full control over who can see which content or with how many people you want to communicate with. The fact that the app was named after the Geneva Convention is of course a bit dramatic, but people are suffering greatly. Geneva taps into Gen Z’s desire for community without the pressure of constantly curating their online persona, following algorithms, and counting likes.
But where anonymity reigns, trolls and misinformation often follow. Geneva tries to combat this through a number of features. For example with so-called gates that control access to their home, including built-in questionnaires. This is to decide whether new users are suitable before they are accepted. Trusted members of the community can be given “keys” to control who can invite new members, create new rooms, or moderate messages. The principles sound surprisingly familiar. Namely from the pre-social media era of the internet, when people were still the bosses of their own forums. Let’s see if they still work today.