Flutterby™! : On new virtual spaces

On Facebook, a friend asked if the rush to http://ello.co was an antipathy towards the existing social media. I responded:

I don't think it's simply antipathy: A friend of mine reported that his daughter said "Facebook is for people I know and don't like, Tumblr is for people I like but don't know". What drove many of us to BBSes, and then to the Internet, and then to blogs, and then to whatever's next is a drive to improve the quality of our social contacts. I got my Ello invite from an exclusive IRC channel where we've been talking about how to increase the number of quality participants, without some of the down sides of IRC.

Social spaces have entropy, and they stagnate. Many of us are constantly looking around for new ideas, new voices, new experiences, and even though deep nerds like me look to the new walled silo and cynically think "well, that socially liberal TOS will last until the next funding round", we also have this glimmer of hope that this time will be different. Or that in the months or years that this particular space shines, we'll get some of those endorphin experiences.

I still hope that we'll be able to pull the conversation around to something more like blogs: self-controlled, personal, and all that. But most people don't get the why (heck, some of the early bloggers whom I respect don't care about some of those issues of autonomy and control when weighed against low readership), so we keep latching on to this rising star or that one, hoping that this time someone will figure out how to give us something for free without selling us out.