So, I never really used twitter and have pretty heavily avoided social media[^1] for one reason or another over my years. Cohost has basically been my first that I've put any energy into, and it's been fun. Unlike me, most everyone else here has been on other social medias and they've been working on adjusting to it in one way or another. Something I often wonder is, what do people ultimately want out of social media? What's the purpose? I hesitate to call it a "goal" because that sounds a lil too.... reductive? But, you put energy into it so you've gotta get something back.
This is more rambling than anything really coming to a point or conclusion.
Is it a way to meet friends? Find people with similar interests to form... again, hate the word "connections" here. Relationships feels a bit loaded but, yeah, interpersonal relationships. People you can have a conversation with or at least ask how they're doing because you care about how they're doing. People that do things that interest you that you want to hear about, ask questions about.
Is it for business? Do you need to make sure people know you do a thing in which they can give you money to do, in one way or another? This is fairly straightforward and I think the key goal of most Social Media. Everything else on those sites is in service to this. Not the key goal of this site for a number of reasons, though you can still use it for that.
Is it to scream into the void? I'm probably painting my bias here, but I for sure also do this. This is kind of what blogs are for, for most people. You write a thing, that people may or may not read, but because it's online you assume someone will read it and that makes it worth writing. Honestly this post counts as that, and that's fine. It's all kind of, sort of, venting. It may not be venting in the "releasing negative energy so it no longer follows me like a dark cloud" sense but it's otherwise writing something and setting it to sail so it can either come back with a response or just go away. And there's emotional value to that, I think.
Is it for the dopamine? Again, painting biases, but even here it's nice to post something and get a number that presumably means someone enjoyed the fact that you took the time to post. The hole goes much, much, much deeper obviously, I don't need to go into the details of how other sites use number go up as a the core driving force of the whole platform. But, that dopamine creates motivation.
I always think of fursuiters on tiktok as my reference here. For me at least, fursuiting by myself sucks. You're just hot and sweaty, and in my case can't even see yourself well with a mirror. If you want to do anything you have to record it, then watch it back later. What are you even going to do other than look pretty? Number going up can create the motivation to actually go through all the trouble of getting prettied up to record something, because then someone else will see it and instead of noticing every tiny thing wrong like I might, they'll see a pretty fursuit and hopefully enjoy whatever the heck it is I did in it.
There's a lot of potential downsides and pitfalls to that, which I do not need to elaborate on here.
Is it to graze? Again the term I'm choosing to use feels a bit derogatory, but I don't think it's inaccurate. And it's something I do too. What if you just wanna see cute fursuiters? I sure as hell wanna see cute fursuiters. Lots of them there's no point in me ever trying to hold a real conversation with, nothing past "wow pretty fursuit :3". I don't have to be friends with everyone I see online. Actual Friends, not "mutuals" or whatever platform specific term you want to use for when you both see eachother's posts. So ultimately I'm just here to graze on their (curated) field.
I don't think there's anything wrong with the core concept of grazing, but it can lead to all the parasocial oddities that come with broadcast communication. You only ever see someone's best fursuit clips or pictures. You don't see all the time they spend completely worn out during or after. Or the work that went into it. Or the weeks or months they may go between actually getting in suit as they trickle out posts, because they don't have the energy or privacy or someone to help out or whatever. Which again is fine in isolation, but the cherrypicking can just as easily make someone else feel inadequate as much as entertain them. Again, just using fursuiting stuff here as an example.
I'll try to come to some conclusions having written all of this, and also deciding I need to not spend any more time writing this.
First of all, this is absolutely screaming into the void, because while I'm sure some people will read it and not thought that they've wasted their time, I doubt any of this is ultimately new to someone on cohost and they've probably thought about it themselves before too. But I've sent the ship out to sail now and don't have to look at it's ugly bow anymore.
Second of all, I for sure like having actual interactions with people, not "broadcast" interactions. I already knew this, and I think I've done about everything I can to encourage it, but it always feels a bit weird doing anything past the most causal of grazing of someone's creative output (regardless of how much effort went into it) without being able to... have a normal conversation with them. This buts up hard against the social bandwidth I actually have... which sucks. I guess people use the broadcast distance to get around those limitations.
Third of all, having just written the above part my brain said "What about 'asks' posts?" and BREAKING THE BOTTLE ON THE BOW, GET OUTTA HERE HMS MINDSINK
[^1] Specifically blog or "broadcast" (think computer networking broadcast) social media. For those pedants that like to chime in "oH bUt AnY oNlInE cOmMuNiCaTiOn Is SoCiAl MeDiA" when I try to discuss this stuff. Stop it.
I don't know why the footnote is broke. I'll fix it later.
Intentionally untagged