My Only Complaint About ‘Post’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m of an age where I’m generally indifferent about a lot of things that used to bother me — I just don’t have time for that shit, as they say. So, when I got invite to the new Twitter clone “Post” I was mildly interested to see what it was like.

And, after having used it a few days, I can honestly say I really like it. It’s spare, but has a lot of potential and is small enough that it still has that new social media platform smell to it. There are some quirks, but nothing so difficult as to make it unusable.

Once it gets some of the basic features that Twitter has, I could definitely see myself using it so much that I don’t really use Twitter that much.

But.

The problem with Post is not the service, but the sense one gets using it that a lot of its initial users see it as a liberal-progressive “safe space.” That is not bad unto itself, but when the service is just a bunch of people agreeing with each other it can become boring.

But there are two reasons to think I’m jumping the gun a little bit and things aren’t going to be as bad as you might think.

One is, Twitter is already so siloed when it comes to political discourse, it’s not like there’s all that much real debate going on. In fact, in my experience, in recent days, the only actual debate between people who disagree comes from when one side or the other notices something from the other side and retweets it into their echo chamber.

Otherwise, the two sides don’t talk to each other about politics on Twitter.

Meanwhile, another thing that Post has in its favor when it comes to not being boring is the anti-MAGA liberal-progressive alliance is so diverse and fractious that people who agree in general about the dangers of MAGA that there is still a lot of room for debate.

I suppose what really bothers me is not so much that Post is going to be boring as it is the possibility that it’s going to be populated with a bunch of smug people who think they have it all figured out and, as such, don’t build up the intellectual antibodies associated with robust debate.

Such smugness is really fucking annoying, regardless of your political leanings. But I fear what’s really going on is if Post becomes popular then it’s yet another common element of society that has been destroyed and segmented into Red and Blue.

If that’s not a “Not great, Bob,” trend, I don’t know what is.