Green Fields, New Games
Probably, there is never going to be one killer social media app that everyone is going to be on1.
It doesn't matter how perfect your app design is. Inevitably your first users are going to do something quirky and unexpected and just a little anti-inductive, and then instead of a smooth intuitive interface for posting and interacting, what you'll secretly face is a gauntlet of random bullshit like "you shouldn't let acquaintances know you watch their stories, so what you do is watch a story you are allowed to watch, and then you can swipe left to see the next story, and it'll autoplay, but if you don't remove your thumb, you can swipe back to the original story after you've watched it and this way you won't leave a read receipt."
And then the latecomers to the app (the untrendy people, or just like, the people who were twelve when you made the app and now they are fifteen) are either going to have to get someone to explain to them all the bullshit invisible rules (which by the way, might be fragmented between different communities so it's not like the people who run the social media site can change its design to facilitate a new universal use case), or feel lost and alienated because they are always committing some social faux pas or another. So they move to a new social media site instead, one with a smooth intuitive interface. Xillennials got everyone on Facebook, but then the millennials moved from Facebook to Instagram, and then the zillennials started using Instagram weird (blank profiles! finstas!). The zoomers are on BeReal and Tiktok and Discord2. This isn't necessarily because the shiny new sites are better; the change in default social media site was actually materially bad for me.
But the psychic overhead of playing in someone else's sandbox is genuinely very high, so I understand the desire to run to more pristine pastures. I run rationality meetups and am somewhat well known for that, so sometimes my friends in other cities tap me for advice when they want to run meetups of their own. What I always tell them to do is to make new infrastructure for themselves - new group chats, new mailing lists. The old one has cruft and people hate it when their infrastructure has cruft, so then they don't use it. No one likes posting messages in a discord server that's been dead three years, especially if they have stupid channel names that are meaningless to you. It's much nicer to be in the inaugural cohort.
This generalizes beyond social media and digital infrastructure. Starting a new game is almost always going to be more satisfying than opening up your old Civ save or Don't Starve server and trying to suss out what the idiot who started it was attempting to do.
I prefer playing new board games over old ones because I like the idea of "discovering" the engines and tactics and fuckups instead of knowing that I can theoretically go read books and practice and get better at the thing through good hard work. I like modern art museums because if I don't get a piece of art there it doesn't necessarily mean anything in particular, but if I don't get a Rembrandt at the Met, that's definitely, unambiguously a skill issue on my part.
Greenfield projects are satisfying. You get to do whatever you want: no constraints, no dependencies, no compromises. Everything just the way you like. By the way, as someone who got their degree in urban planning, it is insane to me that the wikipedia page for greenfield projects is about software development and not actual land development. Do you know where the actual, literal green fields are? They are on the edge of settlements. And their development leads to suburban sprawl for ever and ever and ever.
But still the greenfields beckon, and every generation builds for itself anew. New platforms, new suburbs, new games, new wheels.
[Next: Brown Fields, Mausoleums]
unless some sort of state imposed fuckery happens.↩
After misspent youths doing warrior cats roleplay in the barnes and noble website book reviews. god the zoomers are so cool.↩