I recently came across developer theory of third place. The theory says that every human will have a third place, besides home and work. It is the place where they meet each other, interact and have the outside world exposure.
Fred Gooltz defines the criteria for third place as follows
- They must be free or relatively inexpensive to enter and to purchase food and drinks.
- They must be highly accessible, ideally one should be able to get there by foot from one’s home.
- A number of people can be expected to be there on a daily basis.
- All people should feel welcome, it should be easy to get into a conversation. A person who goes there should be able to find both old and new friends each time they visit.
Though these are laid out with assumption of the physical world. I will go ahead and retrofit these criteria to online. Because the Internet is my third place and I can only, apply to the platforms, I use every day during my free time.
I don't have Facebook account. I have also quit whats app for telegram to focus on other things I care about. So, I don't seem to spend time here.
Medium
It was a pleasing experience to read the articles
in sleek typography with no ads. But
soon things started to go down the hill with people starting to write open
letter to their
ceo. But occasionally you might also stumble upon gems like open
to the open letter. I also feel that Medium's primary motto with
recommendation is tuned, to keep you
engaged within the platform than anything else. Less informative article,
articles that are gaming the system are
getting huge page hits than the deserving ones. These days, I will read an
article only if multiple people share it
on Twitter. Medium for me, is just an attention craving
platform. Me..Me..and Me.
Quora
Exceptional one-off-late-stage
YC company sadly is, noisy and less moderated. People are too busy in
asking questions like What
can I learn right now in 2 minutes that will be useful for the rest of my
life? I don't
visit it unless my search engine takes me there and I haven't got what I was
looking for elsewhere.
Reddit
It is the geeky corner of the Internet. If you're
interested in finding more about
few stuff, then Reddit is the place to go. Content curation is the key
here. You can customize your front page
of the Internet.They have sub reddits to hang out with communities like selfhosted, freesoftware.
At the same time, finding a valuable content is time consuming.
Hacker news
I have decided nested comments is not for
me. For the same reason, I don't read all
Slashdot comment. I may be biased, the best commenting system I've used is
stack overflow's. Enforcing strictness to
just one level nesting benefits the reader. In the long run, post will have
more reader than participants. I also
feel that comments can be of more value when its just below the same post than
lying around in some other part of
the web.
Personal blogs
If something ever has challenged me
for a change, It is the personal
blog. Particularly that of Joel and Jeff. Reading their post has shaped my
thought process and helped
forming opinion on things. This platform has always delivered value to me. The
post that impacted
me most was
written years ago. I don't know what makes it work, whether my attention when
am on it, or just their perspective
without monetary motivation behind it, or just the long form with their
argument, or the human touch. I don't know
what it is. I am still an avid reader of blogs. On any given day, I will
prefer things on personal blogs than hosted
content on Medium or elsewhere.
Business blogs
Only in our industry, People are sharing
what worked for them. They teach how to
trick the visitor for their email in the name of give aways, X things they did
to increase their email list, How did
they increase the revenue from $1000 to $XXXXX. Click baits. You will find
their pitch somewhere inserted into them.
Their intention is to collect your email now and sell something later. I
believe you can't a deliver value if your
intentions are tied to monetary gains. On the contrary, such articles on
personal blogs will be of different tone,
you won't feel odd.
Twitter
I agree with Fred wilson's reasoning on why he
is bullish on Twitter but Not on
Facebook. Not on Instagram. Not on
Snapchat. Not on Pinterest. I too consider twitter to be more of micro
blogging platform than social network
because people don't often share their personal things. Following strangers
isn't creepy. There is no login wall for
consumption and also most people are mindful of how they use 140
characters to say what they wanted to say.
Crowdsourcing and amazingly different people on twitter make it interesting.
Retweets by people are far more
sensible than a platform's recommendation.
To sum it, this is how my third place on the Internet looks like
Personal blogs > Micro blog > Recommendation platforms > Commenting platforms (reddit/HN) > Business blog > the social platforms
The restriction and moderation within the platform seems to be the key in driving the value out it. If it occurs to you, that you're spending way too much of your time on your chosen third place instead of doing things you want to do. I hope, now you know what to look for when choosing a third place to spend your finite time.
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