Throwing back to the times before Facebook
What did the landscape look like before Facebook? Substack vs Facebook
Reading this tweet got me thinking about how Facebook impacted the internet and social media landscape. What “social media” looked like before Facebook became the definer of the genre
Before Facebook became huge, young people were sharing their thoughts and feelings on the Internet in various forms. Some pre-cursor “social media” products that come to mind are: LiveJournal, MySpace, Xanga.
They were more artsy and niche compared to what Facebook is now, and were more oriented towards blogging and personal writing. Xanga, which was very personal-blog-oriented, was quite popular with teenagers. Good writing needs a good space for it, and unfortunately the corporatized “universality” of today’s social media is often a toxic environment. A few malicious actors - and there are many malicious actors in the world - can ruin the experience for everyone.
So when I see Substack popping up, I think through history. Certainly the concept of having a written personal blog, publication, or newsletter on the Internet is far from new. But it’s something that may have been lost by the wayside since 2008 or so, as the Facebook steamroller paved over an earlier generation of proto-social-media products (Xanga, LiveJournal, MySpace).
Personal online blogging probably became an underserved niche again, creating a space for Substack to pop up and reclaim.