LiveJournal was created in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a personal journaling application for his own use, but he soon transformed it into a website that allowed others to maintain online diaries and interact with friends, marking the beginning of its evolution into a social networking site .

This transformation was significant because it introduced a novel blend of blogging and social networking, enabling users to connect more intimately than on other blogging platforms, which typically focused on individual expression without the same level of community engagement .

LiveJournal distinguished itself through features such as friends lists, customizable privacy settings (public, friends-only, or private posts), and the ability to comment on each other's entries, fostering a strong sense of community .

Users could also join interest-based communities to discuss shared topics, further enhancing the platform's social aspect .

Extensive journal customization through user-generated themes and layouts, as well as a simple markup language for formatting posts, made LiveJournal accessible and highly personalized .

At its peak in early 2005, LiveJournal boasted over 2.5 million active accounts, making it a major player in the early social media landscape .

The platform's community culture was characterized by a strong sense of belonging, with users forming friendships and engaging in discussions based on shared interests .

However, LiveJournal's popularity began to wane after 2005 due to the rapid rise of new social media platforms like Myspace and Facebook, which offered more advanced features, visually appealing interfaces, and broader social networking capabilities .

The emergence of mobile-centric applications and platforms prioritizing short, multimedia content—such as Instagram and Twitter—further diminished LiveJournal's appeal, as users shifted toward more immediate and visually engaging forms of online interaction .

LiveJournal was created in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a personal journaling application for his own use, but he soon transformed it into a website that allowed others to maintain online diaries and interact with friends, marking the beginning of its evolution into a social networking site .

Title:

Content: Regulators Seem to Think That Facebook Is the Internet

That’s a problem.

In 1997, SixDegrees.com was the first real attempt at social networking, creating a space where users could upload their information and list their friends. The site peaked at approximately 3.5 million users before it shut down in 1999.

Since then, a series of social networking business models have emerged, each time offering more advanced tools for user interaction. LiveJournal, a site for keeping up with school friends, combined blogging and social networking features inspired by the WELL; Friendster was a social network that allowed for increased interaction and control by users; Myspace had open membership and gave users the freedom to customize their pages. In 2005, it—and its 25 million user base—was sold to News Corp. But within three years, Myspace had been surpassed by Facebook, which launched in 2004 for college students and opened to everyone in 2006.

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As that history shows, in the early days of the internet, disruption was profound and constant: New companies emerged in music, video, e-commerce, publishing, and telephony on an almost yearly basis. The internet appeared to be a space where competition could thrive.

Not anymore.

Today, disruption happens in much smaller ways. The examples are getting fewer because economies of scale have concentrated innovation in the hands of a few players.

More often, disruption comes from regulation—for better or, often, for worse. Current regulation attempts focus on the actions and behavior of some actors—chiefly Facebook—while creating unintended consequences for the internet, particularly fragmentation, or the splintering of the global internet into one that more closely hews territorial borders.

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It’s understandable that both the public and regulators might think that regulating “the internet” means focusing on the biggest players. Much of it has to do with the fact that users are often exposed to various types of illegal behavior and content through some of the most popular services that exist on the internet. Fix misinformation, or extremism, or ideological silos, or security on Facebook, the thinking goes, and you’ve fixed it on the internet as a whole.

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But this is an unhelpful and misguided narrative. First, the internet is not a monolith, so treating it as if it is simply will not work. Second, many of the issues regulators are trying to address are not internet problems; they are societal. Terrorism, child abuse, and mis- and disinformation are not an offspring of the internet; they existed before the internet, and they will continue to exist after it as they are ingrained in human societies. Yet, they are treated as if they are exclusively internet problems. Third, and most importantly, regulators should stop thinking of the internet as Facebook and treating it as such. In the internet regulatory landscape, there is a mixed bag of different issues, and Facebook’s involvement in all of them, direct or indirect, adds to the current complexity. Content moderation, privacy, intermediary liability, competition, encryption—these are all broader issues related to the internet, not just Facebook. Yet, the pattern that has emerged is to treat them as Facebook issues. What this means is that, instead of focusing on trying to address them in ways appropriate for the entire internet ecosystem, they are addressed through the Facebook lens. This has been quite accurately characterized as the “Facebook Derangement Syndrome.”

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The global regulatory agenda is replete with such examples. In the United Kingdom, the Online Safety legislation wants to ban end-to-end encryption because of Facebook’s plan to introduce it as a default setting in its Messenger service. On the other side of the Commonwealth, Australia recently introduced a media bargaining code mainly targeting Facebook. Facebook famously “left” the country before renegotiating a new agreement. Similarly, in what seems to be a coordinated effort, Canada has vowed to work with Australia in an attempt to impose regulatory restrictions on Facebook.

And this trend is not limited to the Commonwealth.

India’s new intermediary guidelines aim at tightening a regulatory grip on Facebook and its partner company WhatsApp while Brazil’s fake news bill, which got approved by the Senate, is focusing on content moderation on Facebook and traceability on WhatsApp. In France, there have been conversations about the introduction of “new rules” for Facebook, while Germany’s Network Enforcement Law—NetzDG—was drafted with the primary focus of taming Facebook. Finally, in the United States, the Trump administration issued an unsuccessful executive order that aimed to regulate Facebook for bias.

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This approach of limiting regulation to Facebook is not entirely unusual. It reflects the principal-agent conundrum that, over the years, has allowed companies like Facebook to  propose policies and deploy tools that can have an impact on the way regulation gets to be enforced. The principal-agent problem is predominantly characterized by conflict of interest and moral hazards. Due to information asymmetries, the agent holds the bargaining power, and this creates a few unknowns: The principal is in no position to know the information the agent holds. Even when she does, she cannot be certain that the agent is acting to her best interest. So, the principal ends up focusing squarely on the agent, disregarding any peripheral issues that might be significant.

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The principal-agent problem may help explain why governments appear ready to introduce regulation targeting Facebook; however, it does not help explain why, in the process of doing so, the main loser is the internet and its users.

Over the past couple of years, Facebook has said, “We support regulation,” and “we want updated internet regulations to set clear guidelines for addressing today’s toughest challenges.” This statement would be significant if it did not come across as self-serving. At this stage, regulation is inescapable and Facebook knows it—as does the rest of big tech. In an effort to adapt to this new reality, companies often take advantage of their dominant position to drive regulatory processes, often at the expense of regulation itself.

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In this context, the question we should be asking is not whether regulation is appropriate, but what are the real implications of regulating in such a manner? There is already an argument that focusing on a few, big players has an impact on the health of innovation and the ability of newcomers to compete. And, then, there is the internet. The internet’s global reach is one of its main strengths. It is a feature, not a bug. Among other things, it allows the maintenance of supply chains all over the world; it allows people to communicate; it lowers costs; and it makes information sharing easier, all the while helping to address societal issues like poverty or climate change.

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To this end, the attempt to regulate based on one—or a handful—of companies can jeopardize this very important goal of the internet. It can create fragmentation, in the sense of not allowing data to flow across borders or networks to interconnect, and this can be very real and have a very big impact. It can impose limits on the way information and data gets to be shared and the way networks may interoperate. These are significant trade-offs, and they must be part of any regulation’s process.

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So where do we go from here?

For sure, the answer cannot be to stop regulating. We must accept, however, that the current approach often generates unintended consequences that only superficially affect those who must be regulated.

In this light, a possible way forward is to experiment with regulation. Experimental regulation is a relatively underused approach, yet it is flexible enough to accommodate dynamic markets, like the internet. Originally associated with the work of John Dewey, this idea is premised on the fact that, in policymaking, the way we approach theories and strategies of justice depends on “the experience of their pursuit; it is these changes that then allow us to consider how best to achieve our objectives.” The advantage of this thinking is that it considers unintended consequences as an opportunity to better define appropriate regulatory frameworks and how to achieve the desired goals.

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Internet regulation does not experiment enough, and when it does, it appears to have the wrong focus. In Australia, for instance, the effort to ensure robust journalism in an age of disinformation in social media platforms led to a “link tax” that undermines the architecture, history, and economics of the internet. This is partly due to the role big tech companies play in the regulatory process. One of the immediate things one can observe with internet regulation is the process some actors deploy: In the beginning, they operate in favor of sustaining existing policies and bureaucracies. The thinking is that longevity brings legitimacy, and as a result, the policy becomes its own cause. Once this strategy is embedded in process, these powerful forces move toward pushing their own regulatory agenda.

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It is for this reason that there is a certain appeal toward flexible regulatory systems that allow different units to experiment with different approaches and make room for assessments that separate the relevant from the nonrelevant and preexisting rules. Although experimentation neither offers a drastic approach nor aims to replace traditional routes of regulation, it can limit the risks of politicization, as politics become more context focused.

One of the first things we need is an internet impact assessment that looks at the different parts of the internet’s infrastructure and the effect that regulation may have. It is no longer just about regulating a few actors. It is about protecting the global infrastructure that we all depend on daily.

The internet has a Facebook problem, but the internet is not Facebook.

This article represents the views of the author and not those of his employer, the Internet Society. Facebook is an organization member of the Internet Society.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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This transformation was significant because it introduced a novel blend of blogging and social networking, enabling users to connect more intimately than on other blogging platforms, which typically focused on individual expression without the same level of community engagement .

LiveJournal distinguished itself through features such as friends lists, customizable privacy settings (public, friends-only, or private posts), and the ability to comment on each other's entries, fostering a strong sense of community .

Users could also join interest-based communities to discuss shared topics, further enhancing the platform's social aspect .

Extensive journal customization through user-generated themes and layouts, as well as a simple markup language for formatting posts, made LiveJournal accessible and highly personalized .

At its peak in early 2005, LiveJournal boasted over 2.5 million active accounts, making it a major player in the early social media landscape .

The platform's community culture was characterized by a strong sense of belonging, with users forming friendships and engaging in discussions based on shared interests .

However, LiveJournal's popularity began to wane after 2005 due to the rapid rise of new social media platforms like Myspace and Facebook, which offered more advanced features, visually appealing interfaces, and broader social networking capabilities .

The emergence of mobile-centric applications and platforms prioritizing short, multimedia content—such as Instagram and Twitter—further diminished LiveJournal's appeal, as users shifted toward more immediate and visually engaging forms of online interaction .

Title:

Content: Feb 3 • 12M

How I think social media companies could improve

Plus: the first official art on the moon is scheduled to launch in March

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The visual trends, art, design, and marketing defining the look of politics. You’ll never look at politics the same way again.
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Hey guys, it's Hunter. I'm just recording in my phone right now. This isn't a podcast, no production, no editing, just me and my voice notes. Whenever you write a story that's 600-800 words, there's a lot that gets left on the cutting room floor, a lot of stray thoughts that don't make it into the final story, so for my readers, I just want to start giving you guys an inside look at a little more deeper into the story, some things that I wasn't able to write about, some other thoughts I had.

I've been writing a lot about social media lately — first off, people who subscribe for all my stories about logos and fonts, I promise you we’ll get back to that and if you guys have any stories, if you work in the design space, political design, have any story ideas, just know I'm always open to talking more about that — but social media has been changing a lot and it plays such a big role in digital politics and political communication and people who work in the space are really trying to figure out what comes next. You know, there's no guarantee that the situation we're in today with social media is where we're going to be come Election Day 2024. There's a lot changing and so I've been writing a lot about that.

One interview that I had that I haven't written about yet, it was with this researcher at the University of Albany. His name is Masahiro Yamamoto and he did research about this idea of “prosumption,” and it’s this concept that social media isn't just about consuming, it's also about producing and that makes it radically different than other forms of media. In the past, you could write a letter to the editor, you could call into C-SPAN, you could comment on a news article, like, prosumption has existed before, but social media has completely blown up the traditional top-down approach.

The thing that's really interesting when I was talking to him about this is prosumption isn't just for people who post content. You could be posting nothing and even while you're doing it you're producing data for the algorithm. It's your search history, it's the post you like, it's the posts you linger on, the stuff you share. That all gets fed back into the algorithm so it can serve you more of what you want. When you start to think about social media that way, it really makes you think about it differently and I think people are really coming to grips with social media as it is now isn't ideal, like, the status quo isn’t ideal. There's a lot of problems with it and how do we fix it?

I did a story a few weeks ago about this concept of bridging and there was a paper with this idea that rather than social media algorithms being driven primarily by engagement they can be driven by bridging concepts, things that bring people together. So if there's a piece of content and it gets liked by people with different viewpoints that would be higher in people's feeds, in the algorithm. And what I really appreciated about the paper about bridging is they talked about all the downfalls like it's so easy in theory to say, oh, yeah, let's just do this, it’ll fix everything but they really talked about, the authors of the paper, talked about how this could make social media less engaging and they even point, they argued, they said destructive conflict is an important driver of social change, so reducing destructive conflict to limit the potential for such change and so they're looking at the drawbacks. You can say it's all sunshine and rainbows if we make social media stuff that people people agree on and like but you know, they were able to really talk about there are issues with this. How do we get around it? But but the main point was they’re like our social spaces shouldn't default to being divisive and I think that's one thing that people really see with social media. It really promotes a lot of stuff that that divides people.

Speaking as a journalist, that’s something that I've seen. The Washington Post did a story last September and they were looking at different political influencers who were able to grow their audience after the 2020 election by spreading disinformation and if you're telling people what they want to hear, you can find an audience for that. You think back to the election, Fox News was the first to report Biden won Arizona, they called the election for Biden. If you're not getting this message and this narrative you want to hear, you can find people who are willing to tell you what they want to hear. Social media right now as it works, it rewards that kind of behavior and it's easy to see that across politics, but at the same time like I think you can understand how how people, there's fears about the political influence on algorithms and I think that's a conversation that a lot of people are concerned about.

But I think it's really important to have an honest conversation about that because when we talk about, like, it's so much of the conversation around political censorship on the right recently, like, it comes down to Trump being banned. He's recently been unbanned, but those original bans, it wasn't it wasn't as if he was banned for, like, saying he believes more power should go from the federal government to the state government or he believes in lower taxes, like, he wasn't banned because he was conservative, he was banned for violating the terms of service of these platforms. Twitter, their explanation was they banned him at the risk of further incitement of violence. They have a policy in their terms of service about glorification of violence. And so I think obviously as a U.S. president getting banned, that that has a lot of political implications, and people are like, well if it can happen to Trump it can happen to anyone, but I think it kind of misses the point of why he was banned in the first place.

He's been let back on to Meta’s platforms, back onto Twitter. He hasn't posted yet. But if you look at what he's posting on Truth Social, like, man, the guy hasn't changed. He's retweeting people who write calls to violence. In December, he called for terminating parts of the Constitution. I just think we're having this conversation, we're kind of throwing around this idea, oh, we're censoring conservatives, but it's not as if Trump was banned for anything that has anything to do with traditional conservatism.

But I also think when we have conversations about politics and social media the people who are posting most about politics are the most partisan, you know, it's not moderates and centrists and conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans who are posting. It's people furthest out on the edge and as I've been writing a lot about politics and social media I've been thinking a lot about the parallels to other things too, like, you talk about influencers whether it's like mommy bloggers who present this picture perfect life that isn't a reality or bodybuilders who are pumped up on steroids and PEDs, and it's like these are the people who are posting and I think it kind of gives — whether it's politics or body image — it gives people a twisted view because you're only seeing the people who post the most. There's always kind of argument, like, Twitter isn’t real, social media isn't real. It obviously shows us views of the world, but it paints an incomplete picture because not everyone is posting. Everyone is producing for the algorithm whether or not they're posting, but the people are posting don't necessarily represent the average person and I think that that that's really important when you're considering politics.

I've interviewed a lot of people a lot smarter than me about this and I always ask how do you think we can make social media healthier? And you know, I mean, that's the million dollar question. In theory there's so many things you can do. My interview with Masahiro, what he said “I think social media platforms need to be socially politically more responsible instead of just pursuing their own interests,” and, like, honestly like 100%. There's this initiative called Rebuild Local News and they're aiming to provide billions of dollars to rebuild local newsroom across the country and for people who pay attention to what's been going on for years now in the media industry is local news has been dying, newspapers are dying, and to fill that void is social media. People get their news from social media. It's more nationalized. Anyway, this initiative, one of their funders is Microsoft, the parent company of LinkedIn, and I'm like, man, wouldn't that be great if you also had Meta donating to that and Twitter and Reddit. Local news is it's less partisan. It's delivering news that's closer to home. It's delivered by journalists who don't live far away in D.C. in New York or L.A., they're people's neighbors. I as a journalist, this is obviously something that I'm really attuned to, but I think if social media did more to support local news to support users, be more civically engaged, I think that would go such a long way.

We'll see how social media plays out over the next year and a half. We have Supreme Court cases coming down the pike. We have changes in algorithms, who knows if TikTok’s going to be banned, like, there's so many question marks right now, but I really think at the end of the day, if these companies took more responsibility civically and socially, it would go a long way to creating a healthier social media ecosystem. So yeah, those are just some thoughts I've had. I'd love to hear what you guys think and thanks so much for reading. I'll talk to you later. Bye.

Have you seen this?

The first official art on the moon is scheduled to launch in March. Artist Sacha Jafri’s “We Rise Together — By the Light of the Moon” is set to blast off from the Kennedy Space Center the first week of March and 88 NFTs of the artwork will go on sale. The proceeds from the NFT sales are going to be donated to causes related to health, education, sustainability, and equality. [Hypebeast]

Shepard Fairey did former L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti’s official portrait. “To me, Shepard, you are the metaphor of this city too, because you’re still that graffiti artist, that rule breaker who doesn’t ask for permission, but you also know how to come indoors,” Garcetti said at the unveiling ceremony. [Los Angeles Magazine]

There’s a Rihanna mural up in Phoenix now ahead of her Super Bowl halftime show. The mural was painted by artist Tato Caraveo on the side of a Phoenix record shop.

Ali Hussan-Iddin Karim (@spaceshipthiefingtonworth) • Instagram photos and videos

Why the internet as we know it could be over by the end of the summer. Could the U.S. be headed for an over-filtered balkanized splinternet? Nine men and women in robes could decide. [𝘠𝘌𝘓𝘓𝘖]