With Twitter maybe probably dying I've been thinking a lot about where social media is and where it's going. The thing that keeps rolling around in my head with trends on Instagram and a broader shift to Tiktok that it feels like we're seeing social media dividing up more between "creators" and the "audience", with most people just consuming. There's probably a lot of reasons why but one of the big ones for me is that those sites demand higher effort. Instagram photography went from normal people sharing casual photos to a predominant aesthetic of carefully staged and edited photos that require skill and professionalism; video takes more time than either text or photos to prepare in general; and Tiktok video editing takes time, skill, effort.
If a social media site's going to be a place where all its users can and do take part, it has to have a room for low-effort posting. And believe me, I'm doing my part
Been thinking about this.
My first real internet homes were chat systems. IRC and Geocities Chat. To me, that sort of online space just makes sense. Somewhere where you dip in, people are hanging out, you know they are there because they are talking. Posting is not only low-effort, it is transient, by design.
I do like making, and getting the opportunity to share, high-effort posts (images, blog content). But what I find it is more effective to make them somewhere there is a community. A long time ago I had a self-hosted blog (still have, but it hasn't updated since 2016). I absolutely could not get anyone to read it. I thought at first I could post on the selfhost blog, then post links on the community sites I used. But consistently this would get less traffic and response than simply inlining my content into the community site itself.
So: High-effort content actually benefits from low-effort content. Without low-effort, "chat" content there is no community, without community there is no one to look at the high-effort content. And of course no one has the energy to be doing high-effort posts all the time, so if you can't mix in the low-effort stuff you won't be hanging out enough on the site to feel like doing something higher-effort for it (unless, as Misty mentions, high-effort posts get "professionalized", which I don't think anyone wants).
Going on a bit of a tangent: The problem is there's a balance. Since dropping Twitter I've found myself using Cohost for "mid-effort" posts and using Mastodon for "chat". I've really liked having somewhere to put higher-effort posts after spending so long in the soup of Twitter. However since I do have that post every other week or so I put some work into, I feel a little mentally pressured against making a lot of quick "chat" posts on Cohost. I have this idea if someone clicks my profile I don't want them to have to scroll back too far before finding the high-effort post. I think I might be doing something irrational here (I do sometimes browse people's profiles, but does anyone else?). But I think there's a version of that mental pressure that exists at the level of a whole site. If everyone sees their timeline moves slowly, they might feel anxious posting a lot of quick chat posts, even if those quick posts are actually more entertaining than longform blogs. (This becomes self-reinforcing, if more people posted chat content then everyone else would be more comfortable posting chat content.) But maybe if the site moves too quick (I don't think Cohost is anywhere close to this line) maybe high-effort stuff can't survive there at all. In other words high-effort posts and low-effort posts both benefit from each other, but each also inhibits the other.
Twitter, I think, hooked me so hard because for a while it made me believe it was a mix of the two modes. The timeline moved quick so you could spam chat content all the time. But the aggressive use of RTs meant high-effort stuff "outlived" low-effort stuff, chat posts dropped off the timeline quickly but high-effort stuff lived on for days or even weeks as it circulated in RTs. Looking back, I'm not sure this ever actually worked. The things that take off on any social media site are really unpredictable and I think any longtime Twitter user has had the frustrating experience of something you put a lot of effort into getting ignored while a lowbrow joke gets RTs for weeks (or the dark form of that, a post being kept alive through hateshares). But Twitter made me think it worked somehow.
I don't know how to fix this, or if there's a way to fix it. Maybe every site just finds a balance between fast/slow that it's comfortable with or it dies. There have been some sites that had technical or structural solutions. Kuro5hin had a distinction between "Articles" and "Diaries", two channels, one fast one slow. Some sites effectively use "posts" for high-effort content and "comments" for chat. Cohost I've been using #AndiBlogs and #AndiBlogsMini to organize my higher-effort posts, and it does have that feature where you can pin multiple posts. But again my struggle with Cohost has been (as someone who never used Tumblr and is not used to its format) convincing myself to make more low-effort content rather than showcasing the high-effort content...