Someone should make a platform like this that somehow de-incentivizes influencer culture. I want to see regular people having conversations, not trying to build a following. It's a poison that has snuck into essentially every social media platform.
Invite some friends over, hang out at a park, go to a bar, throw a party, attend church, join a club, play a sport.
Like, at a bar, club, or sporting event in "real life", you might occasionally run into a finbro trying to talk to you about crypto, but it's not the dominant experience.
But is there no way to do the equivalent things online (and there's no obvious reason there shouldn't be an online equivalent to a party or club or even sports league) without it being taken over by people who are there only to build their hustle?
"Real life" doesn't have an algorithm that is so easily gamed, but there are still ways to "game" it. Going to popular locations (e.g. bars), looking presentable/knowledgeable, social engineering, buying advertisements, setting up seminars, etc. But in real life a lot of these are much easier to avoid because there's simply so much more to life that drowns them out. Real life doesn't have a front page that tells you what the most popular person said today -- that is the function of social media (or newspapers).
Of course, social media platforms could be built that don't prioritize content this way, either by using more complicated algorithms that are less easily gameified, or simpler algorithms that cannot be gamified (e.g. simple chronological ranking), or letting the user have more control over the ranking algorithm. But there is currently no simple market incentive for doing so.
That said, I could totally see that shifting even in the coming decade. I think people are getting tired of being advertised to, and transparently being treated as second-class citizen on these platforms. I could see a "premium" alternative to Facebook/Twitter becoming popular, with a small monthly subscription fee in exchange for much more user control and user-centric design.
Of course, more user control means more opportunities for filter bubbles and cultural fragmentation, which as we've seen are pretty bad for democracy. I suppose there is no easy solution to anything.
Influencer culture is something that emerges on a particular sort of internet communication; mostly on the commercial platforms that specialize in asymmetric communication (where a few people produce and the majority consume.) To keep the consuming majority engaged, these platforms constantly recommend they follow the producing minority. Influencer culture is an inevitable consequence of this dynamic.
I suspect that we ourselves are partially to blame here.
Influencer culture isn't a problem on email, IRC, etc. because when we use those we expect ourselves to be active participants. We take for granted that we have to show up and provide something of interest to the others in the forum.
But when we go on Twitter, YouTube, etc. we expect to just mindlessly consume content without giving anything back. That creates an attentional vacuum where everyone wants to consume and no one wants to produce. Influencers fill that vacuum because no one else does.
In other words, email is like a potluck dinner and we would feel rude walking in without a dish. Other asymmetric social media is like a free picnic where everyone shows up empty handed and ends up eating from the giant tub of fries that McDonald's brought as a marketing campaign because, well, what else is there?
So maybe the trick is to avoid communities that you don't contribute to.
It's a shame, because there were some very interesting rooms with good conversations. It's just that it became a chore to have to sift through all the garbage to find them.
For everyone saying "why not just go out in real life?", that's not really an option if I'm cleaning the house for an hour, while clubhouse is. Also, some of those conversations (biologists discussing trends in the field with other biologists) aren't ones that are easy to just call up a few of your buddies to get.
I keep thinking of putting together a bridge between twitter and my mastodon server, but I am always postponing it because it feels wrong.
Mastodon, Pleroma and Pixelfed intentionally lack features that would be geared for influencers. Mastodon has no "quote tweet" to avoid having people taking conversations out of context. Pixelfed even has admin-controlled options to disable "likes" and display of counts altogether.
The clients, having no "algorithm" beyond basic chronological sort, make it hard for influencers to game the system. And it wouldn't be too difficult to have an instance where users have limited follower counts to keep the conversation more personal.
On TikTok you don't have to post every day to "grow an audience", you have to post literally one good video, and if it's really good, it'll get 200k likes by the next morning even if it's the first thing you've ever posted. I think that also leads to a reduction in "hustle culture" – if you post something on YouTube most likely no one will ever see it no matter how great it is. But if you post something on TikTok and it's good, people will see it, and so that obviously creates a much stronger motivation to produce rather than to consume.
You took one part of my comment and missed all the other, more important parts where we were discussing about a platform people can have "closer" conversations.
My whole argument about the Fediverse is that (most) people are not looking for extrinsic motivation to produce. I've seen very little people worrying about "going viral" and like I said the systems are mostly designed to discourage these things. Having someone "posting a lot" will quickly be seen as a nuisance and people will stop following them, or get outright blocked.
the Fediverse is _incredibly_ heterogeneous. pick any two distant corners of it and often they'll be completely unaware that the other corner even exists. the platform allows for different cultures like this and the tooling is such that i _think_ this will remain true as it grows (admins can and do "defederate" with communities whose presence makes the experience worse for them, and as sibling points out there's far less algorithmic-driven content).
so i'm receptive to the idea that a long-term fix for influencer culture -- for those who want to avoid it -- really can be found there, simply because it allows for so much self-sorting. influencer culture might very well still exist, but just like every other culture on the platform it'll be concentrated only to specific corners of the Fediverse.
If users are identifyable, cross-platform self-promotion is inevitable, it's kind of human nature. If users are anon, content is not curatable and quality is unlikely.
I think Twitter Spaces is pretty decent FWIW. Communities already exist around certain topics, there's plenty of subcultures on Twitter. And the platform is already reputation-centric, you can make of it what you will by following appropriate people. So if a reputable person organizes (and curates speakers in) a Space for a given topic, it can make for decent conversations to tune it. Seems kind of as good as anon voice-chatrooms can get.
As an alternative to instagram, there is Pixelfed, which integrates with all the other servers such as Mastodon or Pleroma.