So here's a thing I don't really understand. People hate Twitter. More than anyone else, its biggest haters are the people who use it. They call it a "hellsite", they constantly talk about how terrible it is, and so on and so forth. People also hate Facebook, so much so that the US Government has dragged them in front of the Senate to yell at them. And yet, day after day, people keep using these "hellsites".

And yes, I know, I know. People use social media for networking or selling stuff or catching up with their friends (#BringBackIRC) or whatever. But they still hate it, and bemoan it all the while, right? It's hypocrisy, but it's an understandable hypocrisy. Some people invented a term "enshittification", to describe how these platforms rot and corrode over time, and how people can be forced to use something due to lock-in even while decay happens. Naturally, this leads for some people to cry out for alternatives to the big social media platforms. Some new, smaller upstart players to disrupt the industry, take a piece of the pie from the big guys, get some fresh blood to hit the reset button on things and guide us all to the non-hellsite prormised land, right?

So I'm therefore mystified when alternatives or smaller players in the social media space actually do come along and people absolutely revile them and do everything in their power to shut them down. They look for a tiny chink in the new guys' armor in an attempt to force it wide open and sink their entire operation. Any inappropriate post from the new guys' platform that remains up for more than three minutes is screenshotted and endlessly shared around on the "hellsites" as proof that the new platform is a transphobic/homophobic/xenophobic/neo-nazi/whatever-ist dump. Any instance of a user of the new platform misbehaving is blamed on the entire platform. Facebook can leave up a livestream of the Christchurch shooting for hours, but heaven forbid another platform leave up a similarly bad post for more than a couple of minutes.

And I'm not saying they should be jailed for their failure to be omnipotent. I'm simply pointing out a double standard people don't seem to acknowledge; people bemoan the big players, but if a small player tries to enter the market, they're eaten alive. And when those small players finally get tired of the abuse and pack up shop, the same people who basically libeled them to death go right back to bemoaning the "hellsites" and a lack of alternatives. It's bizzare self-sabotaging hypocrisy. I don't understand it.