social media is a boring, solved game.

it's still a great tool, don't get me wrong, and I love it. But it is SO DAMN boring, and I feel like everyone knows it.

May 17, 2025

i am increasingly bored by the game on these websites:

I was on Substack this morning and suddenly I was overwhelmed by disgust and boredom. Why am I reading all these opinions in my bed right now? Fuck.

This isn’t the first time I have suddenly rejected social media. In fact, I suspect we all feel this way from time to time. When I was 20 I had just moved to San Francisco for work, and I would wake up every day and read reddit until I felt like getting out of bed. My Reddit was really funny, so I would often laugh and smile. But one day I woke up and it all felt sickening… Why am I laughing at these strangers’ jokes? Why did I move to another state to work, away from my family and community, away from my home, if I’m going to spend my time laughing to reddit jokes? Is this relaxing? Is this rest? Suddenly, it was the opposite of restful, and my Reddit use disgusted me. I just couldn’t stand it anymore, the idea that I was treating my homesickness and loneliness with the same endless, upvoted humor day after day. So I deleted Reddit and have had no desire to use it since then. It’s been 7 years.

When I was 21, Priya (re)introduced me to Twitter. I had never really used Twitter seriously, because I knew it was filled with petty, angry mobs who argued ineffectively about politics, and I had already done plenty of that during my tumblr phase in high school, when I started a tumblr to take a stand in the culture war, before I even knew there was a culture war.1 But Priya insisted — “no, you’re using Twitter wrong, you need to follow Visa and VGR and Aaron Lewis and all these postrats. And you need to mute words, and mute or unfollow all your old friends who have bad social etiquette. You can have an entire timeline of people with good social etiquette.”

This was revolutionary, and led to many of the best relationships and projects of my life. Twitter is an unbelievably good social medium. It’s brilliant. But over time, it just began to feel boring and ineffective — I felt like my life could be moving faster, I felt like I could be smarter and stronger, I felt like I wanted to raise a family, and a community, and build businesses, and I craved real life collaborators on this project, not just internet interlocutors.

So, over the last few years, I gathered dozens of my friends from across the internet to live within walking distance from me, and we started a co-living community, and then a university together, and then a tech hub, and dozens of other businesses, spaces, art shows, clubs, and thousands of events. Basically, we organized a whole society, because life takes a village.2 Oh, and my wife and I had our first kid — she is 1 now.

Community co-working — average chill morning at one of our apartments

SO WHY am I reading Substack? I already have a campus, I have a community, I have a physical co-working space filled with smart friends of mine that we built together, I have all the books and essays I want to read printed out in my own physical library, and it's enough material to take me another ~6 months of study, by which point I'd find more to read.

My point is, we have better options than to scroll. Social media feeds are boring. Real life is interesting. This game sucks, I want to play a better one, give me a new MMO! What the hell are we doing here? (I will attempt to answer this in a bit, give me a second).

I deleted my Twitter timeline a few months ago and basically haven’t looked back. I still use it for notifications and posting, but I just don’t have a timeline. Now I’m probably going to quit scrolling on Substack. But I don’t want it to be this way. I owe so much to the internet, and I want to give back. I’m just in search of a new game.

I feel annoyed that there aren't better social options for me. Isn’t there some place where the conversations and relationships are 100x better? Where people don’t just rehash the same topics? Where people actually keep up with the frontier of technological and cultural developments? Where people maintain and improve their relationships instead of beefing? Where people collaborate and build things instead of just talking about them? Is it possible to build or join such a place?

And the answer is: yes, group chats and tpot and the cozyweb and my in-person community.

So now most of my ideas end up locked away in group chats and in-person conversations with friends, because that’s where the best conversations are happening in my life, and I just want to participate. It’s a shame, and in some ways it feels like defecting, because I believe in building up the commons.

so why am I still on social media?

I think I scroll on Substack because I secretly wish it could be this 100x better place. I dream of scrolling on the public internet and having my social dreams fulfilled by reading the right post at the right time, and serendipitously making a friend, or a dozen friends, who change my life forever. Twitter has already given me so many good friends, and I'm good at using it to make more, but boy am I sick of the slog.3

I’m here to make friends, discover life-changing ideas, and collaborate to build a better world.

One way to solve this angst of mine is to do much more writing and much less reading, to find the people who understand what I'm on about on the internet and make friends with them. After all, “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox”. I fully understand that I can solve my problem for myself by writing more.

but aren’t we all feeling this way? can’t we do something about it?

There's also something here to improve about social media as a system. I can’t be the only one feeling this way. Social media is objectively failing, leading to a mass exodus into group chats and the cozy web, where actually interesting conversations can happen, right?

Maybe we can fix this.

I want something in between viral social media feeds like Twitter/Substack and my favorite discord or group chat. The giant feeds feel like boring, factory-produced mono-cultures to me; the group chats feel like tiny, exciting islands where I’m stranded without civilization or tools. I don’t really want to be in either mode, though I certainly feel happier on the tiny, exciting island (given my monkey biology).

We need semi-private containers. Not broadcast and algorithms, and also not walled gardens, but permeable membranes. For instance, take Conferences. Conferences are semi-public, semi-private. It's safe to say something experimental and controversial at a conference, because people there can be trusted to interpret it in good faith, and to be informed on the topic at hand. The overwhelming culture at a good conference is one of interest, curiosity, knowledge, and collaboration.

Maybe we need some easier way to put a "written conference" together on the internet (is this just a zine? a publication?), where the conference writers can moderate attendance and comments and culture in a collaborative, written medium. Maybe these conferences stay up for like a month, and then close. So it's like the cozy-web group-chat dynamic meets the public town square. I suppose this sounds like a forum. Maybe we need to make it as easy to start a quick little “forum” as a group chat?

Maybe writers can submit "main stage" and "side stage" pieces in such a written conference setting, but there is also some free-form drafting space for new ideas, and public comments where you can engage and make friends and network with the “conference” writers.4

Ideally this could solve the problem of group chats getting stale AND also solve the problem of group chats locking good ideas behind completely private doors.

or whatever

Maybe some people would say that’s already what we’re doing on Substack, and I just need to write more. But I’m not sure… something about it just does not feel collaborative enough. It doesn’t feel like my in person community, where we all eat brunch together on Sundays and build our businesses together during the week. It doesn’t even feel like my discord server, where we all shoot the shit and send each other schizo experimental ideas. Instead, Substack is like LinkedIn, but for writing; it’s a social ladder that you climb, not a social tool for collaborating on ideas.

Anyway, it’s not about this particular idea of mine, but about the vibe shift generally.

The current state of the art for “social networks” isn’t bad because it is immoral, it’s bad because it’s dull and lifeless and underpowered and ineffective. These social networks are nothing like the social networks I have in real life; they have nowhere near the coordination capacity, nowhere near the fun, nowhere near the collective intelligence, despite having the advantage of scale. I did better with a dozen of my friends. You call these network effects? We can do so much better.

Good Vibrations

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