About The Rhett-irement Project

Modern social media is, by design, terrible. We've had social media for as long as there has been media. Community newsletters, fan club zines, and family updates tucked into holiday cards were all ways we shared and read news of interest specifically to us. Letters to the editors of newspapers were the comment sections of their day. You could tell who had checked out a library book by looking at the pocket card in the back. I don't remember hating any of those things. Why do I hate social media now?

When the Internet arrived, its great promise was that it could bring people together. There's evidence that it can – it did – for a while. Near zero interest rates let entrepreneurs create huge social networks without the need to generate any revenue. The patrons of those networks got used to having the benefits without having to pay the costs. But even when they're built on free money, businesses need to make a return on their investment. The businesses needed customers rather than patrons. The companies weren't confident that they could charge for something they'd been giving away. So, they leveraged the resource that they had to sell, their patrons' attention, and sold it to advertisers. Then, as any economic systems does, they toyed with ratio of ads to social information until they found the place that generated peak revenue.

Patrons came to social networks for engagement with friends and communities. Since patrons weren't customers, the economic incentives pushed the system to find the smallest amount of patron content needed to produce the most possible ad revenue. In other words, the worst environment that patrons would tolerate while still looking at the maximum number of ads. If you'd like to spend time in the worst environment you can tolerate while also looking at ads – contact me I guess? I'd like to help.

I'm creating the Rhett-irement Project as an experiment in small scale social networks. I'd like to communicate with people I've met in person. I'm not interested in selling anything. I'll write about philosophy. I won't bundle your email address. I'll talk about things I've read. I won't include affiliate links to Amazon. I'll share what's going on in my life. I aspire to lose money doing it. The Rhett-irement Project is a newsletter that you can subscribe to. It's also a blog in case you'd like to see what happened before you subscribed. If you're subscribed, you can comment on the blog. You can also reach me directly at the Project's email address.