I have been fascinated by social media ever since the early days, leveraging it where possible, and diving in early and blindly when new platforms arose.
Now is a very interesting time in social media. I believe it will continue to evolve and improve, degrade and improve again, and I’m happy we’re finally “coming around” to the harms it can do. I believe we have all the pieces in front of us to make it not harmful and a beneficial piece of our lives;
- technology and many eager technologists
- education to help us design supportive technology platforms
- signals from people that it must be better
While I intend to dig in deeply to the above topics, seeing if I can apply some of my energy to make any minor systemic improvement, that's not what this post is about.
Surrounding the US Capital riots in January 2021, an alternative platform called Parler was being used to plan the riots, and was taken down by numerous hosting platforms on January 9th. This was the first I heard about it, and was too late to download it from the Apple App store before it was removed. I put my name on the waitlist.
Fast forward to May 17th 2021, Parler returns to the App Store. After being prodded via email, I eventually signed up and poked around the app, much less enthused than once was. Never really dug in, total screen time since then about 5 minutes.
However, I did continue to receive what felt like a reasonable stream of newsletters and paid for content (upon review there are ~3 emails a week which actually seems kind of obnoxious).
The content of these emails is entirely different from what I usually see and consume. Reading them has provided for me a lesson about mental models of the world, as if anyone is using this as their primary information and ad source, how my mental model of the world would be greatly different than theirs.
Specifically, the ads. The ads are just… mesmerizing. I thought I’d do a little art project and glue a few of the images from the emails together. Enjoy.
