Social media is player versus player, IndieWeb is collaboration, support

12 March 2025

Santi Ruiz’s article 50 Thoughts on DOGE, being the Department of Government Efficiency, headed up by Elon Musk in the United States, isn’t usually the sort of material I link to here, but his write-up offers this fascinating insight into social media:

All of the above means that Elon looks into problems that are largely driven by institutional capture, structural incentives, and overregulation, and sees them instead as problems of waste, corruption, and fraud. Again, I don’t think this is about Elon’s personality so much as it is about the way the information he receives is structured. The more time you spend on the PvP platform that is social media, the more you will be primed to see enemies everywhere.

PvP, meaning player versus player, is a term more commonly seen in the realm of interactive gaming, but isn’t a half bad way to summarise the sometimes competitive, cut throat, nature of social media. Not that I’m suggesting blogging is, or was, any better.

Certainly not in the early days, before social media was a thing. But social media did seem to follow a similar trajectory to blogging. In the earliest years, when blogs were still called personal websites, there was an abundance of collaboration and commeradie. While that never completely went away, as blogging matured, it became more of a case of us versus them, or me against you.

We stopped being friends, and became enemies.

Those around in the early days of Twitter, circa 2007, may have noticed the same thing. Much cooperation initially, which eventually gave way to competition. Not wholly, and not everywhere, but overwhelmingly player versus player.

This is not something we see too often in the more supportive IndieWeb/Small Web space, though there are certainly differences in opinion at times. But I’ll take that over a PvP game from which there seems no escape at times.

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