cohost in memoriam

i think cohost was cool because it was a small step into creating a platform in a niche that nobody really wants to fill because it's such a small market, social blogging

social blogging is smaller than microblogging, and microblogging is smaller than video/images

imo, the best of cohost was the essays

the very low information density on the site allowed you to focus pretty much entirely on the content of the post, and i can't really put my finger on what nuances of the design encouraged people to put medium to longform writing on there, but they were definitely there

it was so nice to relax and just, read someone's essay on there

now what cohost delivered on was ultimately a shell of what the idea could have been with the right execution

imo the best of cohost didn't come about because "relaxing social blogging platform" was the team's initial vision, it was incidental to the cohost team saying "we believe social platforms making the world worse is the result of them having This This and This Addictive Network feature, which is ultimately downstream of the greater moral failure of them being Capitalists"

there's too much to the whole anti software software club vision for me to unpack it all right now but the way i see it, cohost created this ideology for what a social site would be that was just "here's something that exists but pull out the stuff we think is bad" without really being built around the idea of fitting a specific purpose or inspiring a specific feeling in either readers or posters

the best of cohost wasn't something the team really had the vision to pursue

i don't hate team cohost but the realities of running a social site were something they literally weren't mentally equipped to handle, their ideology didn't have an answer to cohost being hit by the realities that hit it, and in the end their answer was "well we were actually still right anyways, the rest of the world was wrong"

stifling network effects (not allowing anyone to display their likes or who they follow) was an interesting experiment but curbed virality SO hard that nobody who didn't already have an established following was willing to put in the effort of building a new following on the unproven platform

cohost (generally, both the team and culture) said this is not a site design problem, that's a you problem

you just can't do that if you run a social platform

the cohost global feed (yeah i'm going there) was a community convention to solve what many users perceived as a problem

the fix for it would have been to create discoverability features that are so much more relevant than it, that the feed disappears because nobody wants to use it anymore

that never happened, they just said publicly that they hate it and the site was split on "well it works for me" and "all hail the cohost team"

ultimately cohost did not work for most people who tried it but i think the core idea of a social blogging platform, one that encourages the reading and sharing of medium to longform essays, with more interaction than you'd get on the average blog comments section or medium article, is a good idea

i just think getting it to work for more people will require more experimentation and willingness to shake up the fundamentals than the cohost team was willing to bring to the table

...

so anyways, i'm on leaflet.pub now