Fixing the Internet in Five Steps

We traded tricked-out profiles with colors, images and songs that we loved for cookie-cutter social media. We traded GeoCities for sleek, corporate designs that look nice, but don't feel like "us." Spending some time on SpaceHey has made me reconsider that trade. (If you're a web developer, you can build more customization options into the social profiles end of web apps that you make.)

"Trending" and "News" are what caused the massive growth of Social Media 2.0. They're also what has made it so incredibly toxic. Constantly keeping people hyped up with divisive content might be great for driving clicks and likes short-term, but it's not good for a community over the long run. Instead of being told what we "should" be engaging with and turning the web into a mass-movement, we can use our connections on sites like this to have more relevant discussions on a smaller level and from the bottom-up. 

New is cool. New moves the world forward. But sometimes, it would be great if "new" came on a little bit more gradually. Views and likes and shares drive dopamine. After a while, we start tailoring the things we post to what is going to give us the most immediate fulfillment instead of what we might really want to say if we'd put a bit more thought into it. Now, your big social media apps do profiles, classifieds, dating...you name it. Maybe the digital spaces we create should slow it down a bit, focus on doing one thing really well instead of constant novelty. 

Times are serious. I'm not going to lie. But we humans, as a group, are pretty resilient. Joy shouldn't be confused with happiness. Happiness comes and goes and we don't have much control over it. Joy, on the other hand, is deeply enjoying the experience of one's life through good times and bad. Maybe we need to do a Marie Kondo cleanup of our own digital spaces and see which ones give us joy. Then, patronize those places with our time and our money.