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The New Hot Social Media Trend Is Actually Interacting with People

Instagram's AMA and a few viral Tweets show there's still hope in hell.
Screengrab from Twitter user @prinxMu

Here are two things that happened this month: On Friday, the creator of /r/kotakuinaction, the hub of Gamer Gate on Reddit, had something of a Network moment. Calling the forum “one of the many cancerous growths that have infiltrated Reddit,” /u/david-me lamented what had become of his creation, writing in a post that it was now “infested with racism and sexism” and that Reddit’s admins were “the stewards of hate and divisiveness
” The toxic environment on the subreddit, and others, had become too popular, and too profitable for Reddit not to let it metastasize unchecked. He was going to do something about it. He was going to shut the forum down.

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Elsewhere, the week before, our attention was drawn to the escapades of #planebae, the story of two strangers who met on a flight and seemed to hit it off. The flirtation was covered in excruciating detail by a pair of voyeuristic onlookers who documented their every move. To many, the entire saga was gross and exploitative, but for tens of thousands of onlookers on Instagram and Twitter, where the woman behind the cutesy stalking posted the slurry of updates, it was something else entirely: It was a romantic love story. More to the point, it was a light and breezy distraction from the typical onslaught of misery social media, and Twitter in particular, has become in the era of round the clock coverage of baby jails. It was a distraction. It was fun. At first anyway.

Neither effort had a happy ending. This is still Hell World, after all. /u/david-me’s decision was reversed an hour later, and the site was returned to its ignominious glory, and the woman at the heart of the plane saga released a statement that she’d been harassed, requesting people just leave her alone. But here’s the thing: there was a flicker of hope in either story. A reminder that people, even ones who run vile forums, and the regular gawkers online can feel a tiny spark of joy every now and again. That’s no small thing. When was the last time the internet made you feel anything approaching happy? The day Ted Cruz got caught jacking off comes to my mind, but other than that? At some point we will have reached a tipping point when it comes to the continuously depressing tenor of the internet at large. We may have already long since sprinted past it. The platforms themselves seem to realize this, and have taken steps to at least show they’re trying something. Twitter just wiped millions of low quality accounts from the service. Facebook is at least making it seem like they’re taking fake news on the site seriously, (they’re not of course, seeing as they refuse to contend with InfoWars). And Instagram—sweet, simple Instagram—has recently rolled out their Ask Me a Question option on Stories. Taken as whole it’s a tiny sign they know things are bad, and are looking for ways to make it less so.

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The platforms will not, you probably don’t need to be reminded, save us. Wrenching our brains back from the perpetual precipice of misery will have to be on us. Ideally, it will be done collectively. Social media, if you’re optimistic about such things, still has a chance to be, well, social. We still, even at this late date, have the option to talk to one another. No, I don’t mean listening to people with differing opinions, this isn’t New York Times op-ed page, I mean just shooting the shit. What a novel idea!

The Instagram Ask sticker is the best example of trying to prime the conversational pump as of yet, but something else in that spirit has been going on on Twitter of late as well. People seem to want to talk to one another. About themselves, of course, but that’s at least a more wholesome prospect than screaming fuck you at each other all day and arguing over who the real Nazis are.

The first of such efforts I became aware of was a few weeks ago when a Twitter user posted this query:

What followed was an outpouring of sharing. Again, it was by and large an open prompt that gave people permission to talk about themselves, but compared to what Twitter has become in the past couple years, it was a relative triumphant breakthrough, with tens of thousands of likes, thousands of replies, and even more quote-tweets answering the question. Twitter, as of yet, doesn’t tabulate the number of quote-tweets, but that is by and large where the action on this tweet and others like it go down.

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Others soon followed:

That second one is a curious case, because what does it even mean? Why would it be novel to be able to trigger a song in someone’s head by
 singing the first lyric to it? It doesn’t matter, and that’s kind of the point. It’s like a great unburdening is under way. No matter that it's frivolous—that only makes it more appealing.

Here’s another:

Each and every response to this prompt that has been clogging up my feed has been stupid and annoying to me. But it’s stupid and annoying in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s retro, in a way, to communicate with one another like this, harkening back to the days of LiveJournal and Tumblr, or indeed even Reddit in its more innocent prior incarnations. Social media as a means for being social. Who ever saw that coming?

I am not entirely optimistic that this represents a sea change—it’s likely just a last ditch effort to turn things back to how they used to be, like going out on one last date with an ex you’re about to break up with. But it would be nice, wouldn’t it? We used to have something good. I know we’ve changed, and we’ve both made mistakes, but maybe we can start over? This time it’s gonna be different.

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Follow Luke O'Neil on Twitter.