Newsletter | The 'Slow Food' of Social Media
Image by ngoc202020 from Pixabay
The big social media platforms have long been blasted for extractive business models that optimize for attention, engagement and time on the platform. We’ve almost become numb to stories about toxic behavior, misinformation, bots, growth hacking and all the cynical techniques that the platforms use to keep people coming back and staying on. What if there were a different story, one in which tech actually builds community, where the goal of online communication is to foster more in-person interaction? That story exists: it’s called Front Porch Forum, a series of small community networks available only in Vermont, and the subject of a couple of recent profiles.
Front Porch Forum (FPF) has been on our list of Builders since the early days of Building H because it manages to support civil, highly localized dialogue that brings people together with their neighbors and others in their (largely) small town communities. The Washington Post's Will Oremus, in Front Porch Forum is the friendliest social network you’ve never heard of, digs into what makes it so special. The keys are design with intention and a patient, careful approach to growth. FPF is set up so that only people within the local community can participate – they don’t allow outsiders. Content moderation is central to their model. No post goes up without first being moderated, which in addition to keeping the tone quite civil, creates a time delay that tends to make it less immediate. The delay lowers the intensity, which in theory could make it less compelling – but that's okay. FPF founder and CEO Michael Wood-Lewis says he only wants people on for about 5-10 minutes a day. He’s not expanding rapidly (he’s definitely not into blitzscaling), he chose not to sell the company, and his near term expansion plans don’t go beyond Western Mass and Upstate New York. Summing up FPF’s approach, Oremus writes, “It has achieved critical mass in the Green Mountain State not by embracing the growth hacks, recommendation algorithms and dopamine-inducing features that power most social networks, but by eschewing them.”
Oremus’ article was spurred by a recent research report, put out by New_ Public, that surveyed FPF users and had them compare the site to mainstream alternatives Facebook and Nextdoor. New_ Public’s Josh Kramer breaks down the findings in The Vermont miracle: How one local platform is rewriting the rules of social media. What’s clear from the piece is how much users really value FPF. Ninety-seven (97!) percent consider it very or somewhat valuable to their community as well as being useful to themselves and their families. From New_ Public’s perspective, it’s validation of the idea that carefully designed online spaces can foster local civic engagement. The negatives we often associate with online communication are not inherent to the medium – they result instead from the business models and the design choices that flow from them. Front Porch Forum is an important counterexample.
Both Oremus and Kramer caution that FPF’s approach isn’t going to spread rapidly. It did grow up in the rather distinct environment of Vermont (New_ Public founder Eli Pariser is quoted as saying that “It’s not totally shocking that the ‘slow food’ of social media is coming from Vermont.”) and, as noted earlier, is not planning to scale nationally anytime soon. The irony, is, of course, that the approach that has made FPF so valuable is what also makes it unlikely to spread to more communities. So the question becomes less about scaling FPF and more about how can we create conditions so that more companies with similar values, which would pursue similar approaches, can emerge -- and flourish.
How can we create those conditions? Comments are open below.
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